The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends!

One of the things that I otherwise always find difficult, despite what one might think, is speaking, and it always means a kind of difficult decision for me to speak, despite having to do so so often. It seems particularly difficult to me in this day and age, in this time when the heart and soul are burdened and weighed down by so many things.

Not only do I long to be with you, my dear friends, again after a long time, but today there is also a very special reason for our being together. Today is the eve of the anniversary of our laying of the foundation stone. It will be exactly one year from today, Saturday; according to the date, it will be one year tomorrow, Sunday. We will therefore gather today and tomorrow, and I ask our dear friends to please gather in this room tomorrow at six o'clock as well. We will not read the drama, as was the custom during the time I was not present, but we will try to spend the evening in a different way tomorrow. The drama reading can take place again in the near future.

But today, above all, I would like to remind you of the ideas, feelings and emotions that moved our souls when we laid the foundation stone for this building here on this hill a year ago. Even though few of you, my dear friends, were present at that time in terms of your external, physical personality, in terms of your hearts and feelings, you were all there. And all those who have since then worked so lovingly and selflessly on this building have experienced for themselves and also shown how closely they are connected to the feelings and emotions that, at that time, in the most beautiful sense of the word, namely, glowing with divine fire, when we - it had to be so; it was brought about by the circumstances of the time - laid the foundation stone in a small circle.

At that time, we tried to use few words to guide us in the soul, which spirit this building should be. We tried to envision how we could see from this hill to the north, south, east and west, and how we want to serve that spiritual life, which we are convinced humanity in the north, south, east and west needs if the development of the earth is to proceed in the appropriate way intended by the spiritual hierarchies.

Indeed, I also believe I have sufficiently pointed out that it is not a proud feeling with which we present our view of spiritual life as the one that must be intimately connected with the salvation of humanity. Rather, this emphasis is truly connected with the feeling of humble modesty that we only want to be servants of that spiritual life that wants to flow in, through the peaceful harmonies of the higher hierarchies, into the salutary development of the human race.

So we understand the matter, that we do not rise in pride because we believe we recognize something special, but that we feel blessed by the divine spiritual beings, feel blessed to be allowed to be servants in the development of the stream of spiritual life to which our soul, our heart, our whole human being is attached.

And it was at that time, my dear friends, that I was allowed to speak for the first time the words of which I not only believe I know, but – with all the certainties with which one can know such a thing – I truly believe I know that they were heard from the divine-spiritual heights by that entity that was to become the bearer of the Christ who would harmoniously unite people.

It was one of the most uplifting moments for me that I have experienced in our movement when I was allowed to speak the words for the first time:

Amen!
The evils prevail,
Witnesses of dissolving egoism,
Guilt of selfhood incurred by others,
experienced in daily bread,
in which heaven's will does not prevail,
because man has separated himself from your kingdom
and forgotten your name,
you fathers in the heavens.

In these words, whoever reflects on them often enough will gradually find that they contain everything that can move human hearts and souls in a great and sublime way. But these words also contain everything that can cause human pain and suffering in human hearts and souls. And if we allow them to work in the right way in our souls, these words contain the strength that can sustain us in the sense of our spiritual current, can endow us with inner security, in whatever situation in life we may find ourselves, whatever life circumstances we may be forced to face.

What, my dear friends, inspired us when we turned our thoughts to such a building, as it now stands before us as a landmark, years ago? We were inspired by the conviction that the salvation of humanity depends on not only the theoretical knowledge and conviction of the existence of the spiritual worlds flowing into humanity, but also on our direct experience of them, on our being united with the spiritual worlds in our souls.

We are permeated by the belief, my dear friends, that this spiritual life is present in the world everywhere, but that it is up to people to grasp it, because man is meant to be free in the world, and this spiritual life approaches him only on condition that he wills it, that he take it up into his will. This justifies the necessity that we find imposed on us by karma to do everything that can release this sacred human will from the depths of human nature, wherein it is often so hidden that it may unite with the converging will of the hierarchies, who will then choose the earth as the site of a cosmos where, in the future, holy, spiritual Christ-sunlight will shine if humanity wills it, if humanity wants to mature for it.

The thought occurred to us at the laying of the foundation stone before the year was out - but it did not live much longer, but that is our karma - that with the last days of July this year our building would be ready, so that it could be spoken in the sense that had been indicated by the reality of spiritual life and its reception by man.

Of course, karma willed otherwise, and the human soul must learn to submit to necessity through spiritual science. If the idea of coping in July had been realized, then, my dear friends, we would now be able to feel how, during the entire construction of the house dedicated to our sacred cause, we could look down – as we looked down at the time of the laying of the foundation stone to the north, south, east and west – on the peace that prevailed among people.

Now, that did not happen. The last work of our construction must look down on a completely different world, my dear friends, on a different world, which can truly evoke deep feelings of suffering in those hearts that have already been filled to a certain degree with the spirit of the spiritual life that we mean.

However, as I already indicated when I last spoke to you from this pulpit, it would be a sign of weakness for those who are engaged in the spiritual life if we did not , at least in our inmost being, we have developed the faith in the one great victory that must come – may it come in whatever way – in the victory and the victoriousness of the spiritual life. We can celebrate, my dear friends, the annual festival of a building that is intended to serve in the most eminent sense to bring together human souls across the earth in harmony. If it should happen, as honestly and uprightly as it can happen, then the way we stand by our building should correspond to what is the first principle of our spiritual movement, and what is expressed in the foundation of every single, even artistic, form of our building.

If anyone takes the trouble to study the individual artistic forms of our structure, they will find that, in addition to everything I have allowed myself to say in the course of the lectures in this room about the meaning of the forms of our structure, every detail expresses the sense of the true Christ impulse to embrace all human hearts, as they are found among the peoples and races of the earth. For, my dear friends, the spiritual life of humanity, life in the spirit, is one; and from the words I spoke here last time, you will have gathered how this must be understood in the most earnest and worthy way.

The spiritual life of humanity is one. But if we want to make this sentence completely our own in the immediate present, we will have to take some of what we have learned in the course of our spiritual work over the years seriously, deeply, deeply seriously.

And let us not hide from ourselves that it will be difficult for some souls to perceive the things that have been accepted as truth in the deepest peace, in the immediate present with the same intensity as truth. But on the other hand, let us remember that this is precisely our test in the present time: to take things seriously.

Now, my dear friends, let us look at an example. It was during the time of deepest peace that I spoke to a number of our friends in the north, in Christiania, about the nature of the folk souls and their significance in the evolution of humanity. There is no doubt that the lectures given at that time on the nature of the folk souls were understood by our dear friends in an objective way; but it is also equally certain that many other people in the world who are outside our society could have understood these lectures in an objective way at that time.

It cannot be assumed that we would be able to accept such lectures with the same objectivity today without being truly moved in our innermost being. And yet, I would like to say, how instructive for today, for the immediate present, what was said in Christiania at that time about the nature of the souls of the people could be! Perhaps we may be permitted to remind our friends of some of the lectures of those days, and particularly of what was said at the time of the greatest peace, at least for the greater part of the European nations.

My dear friends, before I draw your attention to what was said about the national souls of Europe in the course of these lectures, let us consider a fact, a fact that is, so to speak, intimately connected with a correct, deep and serious understanding of our spiritual science. This is this: our soul nature itself, our individual soul nature, is by no means the simple being that exoteric science would like to present it as out of convenience. It is one of the simplest things we have to recognize when we place ourselves on the ground of spiritual science, that we see what a complicated being works and lives in our own inner being. We immediately get to know in our soul being: sentient soul, mind soul and consciousness soul, and how the I is predisposed in it and the striving upwards to the higher members. Immediately we are confronted with a fivefoldness of effective elements. There are still people today who laugh at this description of the soul's elements. But a time will come when people will recognize the complexity of the human soul life, when they will turn their gaze - because life will become more and more difficult in the course of our development on earth - to what so irrefutably shows the multiplicity of our soul elements. This is that our soul members can come into inner conflict, into inner soul war.

We know, of course, how the human soul can feel divided within itself in everyday life at these or those times. The more one delves into the life of the soul, the more significant it becomes when the individual soul members, as it were, rebel against each other within the human being. One perceives how they stand within the human being, one cannot say otherwise: fighting against each other. And the way we are tuned, our state of soul, whether we are more inclined to immerse ourselves in a matter with the element of feeling or more in a rational frame of mind, is reflected in the structure of our being, which is meant to express this.

However, the soul members will only behave correctly if each one finds its corresponding weight, with which it draws the human being, so to speak, to the truly true earthly task required by the spiritual hierarchies, when the soul members come together in harmony. They will become so in the highest sense when they overcome the difficulties that lie in the mutual struggle of the soul members.

In one of the Mystery Dramas there is a scene – in the Test of the Soul – where this inner working, surging and weaving is pointed out in the most eminent sense, but also the fighting of the individual soul forces.

But there is also a representation - and this representation forms the final tableau of the Gate of Initiation, the first mystery play - where what basically lives in the individual soul is distributed among what stands before us in the final tableau. There are Mary and Thomas Aquinas, Lucifer and Ahriman, the hierophants, and so on. They speak with each other, and their voices reflect what speaks in the individual human soul. The goal of the human spirit is to be found in such a union, as depicted in the final temple tableau, where every single soul force and every single personality is placed in its proper place and each contributes what lies in its nature.

I would like to point out the many-sidedness of the human being and how it has been attempted, in the various representations and discussions, to show what works and weaves in the human being in connection with the many-sidedness of the human soul , how we can look into our own soul in true, not theoretical self-knowledge at many an inner war and struggle, and how we can look at the lofty solar ideal that wants to be achieved in human, harmonious cooperation. Basically, our spiritual scientific literature contains everything that can give us not only comfort but also security and support and strength, at least for the inner life of our soul, even in the most difficult situations in life.

Now, in that lecture cycle in Christiania, it was shown how what we otherwise find in the individual soul is, as it were, distributed among the folk souls of Europe. Read about it in the lecture, I think it is the penultimate one, how it is pointed out how the three western folk souls relate to the middle and in turn to the eastern folk soul. Read it up and bear in mind the fact that everything in the evolution of humanity is based on repetition. Bear in mind the fact that the folk soul that prevails on the Italian and Spanish peninsula expresses in a special way what we know as the essence of the sentient soul - a repetition of what was connected with the essence of the sentient soul in Atlantean times. Read up on what has been said about the shades and nuances of the French folk soul and its relationship to the mind soul, and about the British folk soul in its connection with the consciousness soul. Read further and see that in Central Europe, above all, the nuance of the I exists, which prevails in the three folk souls.

Once historians write history in connection with spiritual science, they will be able to objectively describe the rule of the I in Central Europe, from the moment when the army of the Goths and Alarich's wild hordes passed through these lands, through all phases into our and even later times, which are to shine forth in Europe's east: Then they will show what will once be allotted to a distant future.

Yes, so certain, my dear friends, so reassured I would like to say, could one say this a few years ago and know that not the slightest sensitivity could be seen in any of the listeners, but rather it could be seen how what humanity is to achieve is to be achieved in community, but in such a community that flows from objective knowledge, from knowledge that comes from spiritual science.

And now take together what has been repeatedly said about the character of our time, how our time is the period in post-Atlantean cultural development that strives to cultivate the consciousness soul, how all soul forces must work together to give our time the nuances of the consciousness soul. The human I must assert itself in such a way that it finds a way through the consciousness soul, which must necessarily unfold the greatest egoistic strength in order to find the way up into the spiritual self. Not only deeper thoughts, but deeper feelings, feelings of understanding for human development and the character of the times, can move through our soul when we allow such things, as they were spoken at the time and printed as a lecture cycle, to enter our soul with seriousness and dignity.

How does it appear before our soul, this I in relation to the consciousness soul and mind soul, striving upwards to higher realms, forging the way through struggle and war? Frankly, my dear friends, one could not touch these truths again, which were expressed and felt in the deepest soul at the time, in such serious times as ours; they would have been spoken in vain, they would have been understood as a childish game with intellectual concepts and theoretical scientific ideas.

But these things do not only mean that our soul plays with them and finds a theoretical stimulus, satisfies a curiosity about knowledge. The significance of these things lies in the fact that what lies in them can really become the power of our soul. If it becomes a force in our soul, then we can find our way, we can find the possibility to understand ourselves when these things hold their earnest countenance towards us, we can find the possibility to understand them as far as we have to understand them through the power and consciousness of our soul. I know that these must also be the thoughts with which I would like to greet our building one year after the laying of the foundation stone: that it will become a symbol of the strength that we can gain in the sense in which the words just spoken are meant.

“Do we not belong to this building?” one might ask. We belong to the building in a different way than the Gothic church and the community.

It has already been discussed that we form the larynx in the same way as the gods speak. But when we mature and pay attention in our soul so that we receive the science of orientation, the science of finding our way, revealed, then we will recognize in the forms from which our structure is composed the letters of a divine language. We will learn to speak many things differently in the course of human development when we gradually understand this structure.

Time itself is pressing, I would say, out of the configuration of our words often what should no longer be in our words. But everything that is in the spirit of our spiritual science will come, if only we honestly strive to pursue this spiritual science with all the powers of our soul and our mind. We should not be surprised – at most, we may wonder about the point in time at which these things have occurred, and this point in time is explained to me by some occult insights that have been granted to me recently – we should not be surprised, especially not on the basis of our spiritual science, that these events have occurred.

My dear friends, how often have we heard it said that there are basically two currents flowing through the evolution of humanity. One of these currents is still weak, it is the spiritual current to which we want to cling with all our hearts and minds. The other is one that has a materialistic character. I have often spoken to you over the past years about the many forms this materialistic character takes. But you could learn from all that I have said about the materialism of our time that materialism has an effect on all the individual main and secondary currents. Materialism does not only enter into theoretical views. How often has this been emphasized, for example in the last Hague cycle of lectures. Materialism enters into the whole of human coexistence. It has a strong power that is by no means exhausted, that will continue to have an effect in one area – my dear friends, it is good to be clear about how materialism expresses itself; based on the words I have said before, I may assume that the words I will have to follow shortly cannot be misunderstood – [that] will continue to have an effect in the area of human coexistence.

Among other things, materialism has been asserting itself for some time in the fact that – yes, it is difficult to find words for such things – an idea has arisen in the life of European nations that is not really an idea at all and that, in certain respects, is a major step backwards from earlier times: it is what is often referred to as the nationality idea.

Much would have to be said if this nationality idea, which should not be called that at all, were to be discussed exhaustively. But a sense of what prevails in this area can run through our soul when we remember earlier times, times that seem so backward to our supposedly enlightened humanity. Let us remember that a time of ours has preceded, which is called the dark ages, in which people of all nations = one may think otherwise about this time, as one wants - have fought for religious ideas, for ideas that have gone beyond the idea of nationality.

What is present in the spirit as the content of an idea can become present in the spirit and can take hold of the human being as such. It is something that has entered into the formula that was presented here last time as the conversation between the individual and the spirit of his people. But the life of the spirit has receded. Natural scientific thinking and naturalistic feeling have taken hold of humanity. How this presents itself in the field of philosophy is shown in The Riddles of Philosophy, which you will find discussed in my latest book; the second volume also offers an outlook on anthroposophy.

How did it come about that what is called the nationality idea has emerged, I might say as a reflection of the darkening of spiritual life? As soon as one comes to the national aspect – please take this quite objectively – as soon as one comes to the national aspect, the forces that can no longer be overlooked by the spiritual core of our soul come into action. They pulsate through the human organism in an ahrimanic-luciferic way and dissolve into what are called ideas, but which are not ideas.

It may be said here: the more a person frees himself from this nationalistic thinking, the more he comes to see the spiritual world.

I am not saying this out of arrogance, my dear friends, but rather, I would like to say it with inner humility. I grew up in a country in which the most diverse nationalities are not even as far apart as they are here in Switzerland, but live in complete confusion, where one could experience as a child everything that is connected with the rise of the national principle, the national impulses. I do not have one, precisely because of this circumstance – I say it objectively, you may judge it as you will – I have no homeland and I do not really know, from subjective feeling, what is called the feeling of home. It is connected with a certain strange inner tragedy, which is perhaps difficult for someone else to understand if one is prepared by one's karma to be homeless. But all this enabled me to hold my head up high, even as a child, in a country where the individual powers of the soul, like the individual people, stood in relation to one another.

In the middle of the picture of the clashing nationalities, I was in my youth in Austria in it. There one learns about the origin of the nationality idea in a different way than one can learn when living in a homogeneous national body. I was also unable to acquire what is usually called “patriotism” or “national enthusiasm” by working for it. »; nor to the people whose language I speak, for the reason that at the time when one acquires these feelings, when one experiences these feelings, the people among whom I lived were filled with a hatred that can truly be called »hatred of Germans«. Nowhere was this hatred of Germans more intense than in the area of Austria where I grew up. I got to know it in my own family. I did not grow up or was educated in the love of Germanness.

Perhaps some of you recognize that it was precisely because of this homelessness that I was entitled to speak in our area about things about which I would otherwise have to remain silent. That is how it is in my feelings, that is how it is when you struggle through life and its pitfalls. And one can only justify a judgment in one's own soul if one has truly fought for it for decades. I would not make anything out of all the studies I have devoted to the current European situation, I would not believe that I could see the big picture if I did not feel justified in speaking about these things in a few words as I have just done.

One must submit to necessity. But how tempting it is to judge great situations such as the one we are facing on the basis of individual experiences that one has here or there. How tempting it is to judge an entire nation on the basis of individual experiences, which may – as is inevitable in the present day – be rather poorly substantiated.

But occasionally we may also, dare I say, rise a little on a hill, as symbolized by the hill on which our building stands, and look at the matter with the eye of the soul, which the years of working in spiritual science can give us. There would be much to say and perhaps much will be said when calmer times return. But the one thing I would particularly like to emphasize this evening, my dear friends, is how – I would say – those impulses that are now discharging in such a heartbreaking and often horrific way were prepared within European humanity. One could see, as it were, how, with forces still superior to our own, what is expressing itself in our time seized everything that strives towards the true goal of humanity out of goodwill, but less out of insight, because only spiritual science strives out of insight. I say this without arrogance, because it strives under the motto: “Wisdom is only in truth.”

My dear friends, a peace movement spread across the various countries. When the Libyan war broke out, the members of the movement in Milan united and passed a resolution in favor of the Libyan war. They expressed their confidence in the minister who had unleashed this war. Facts are what matter, not opinions. And how could it have been hoped otherwise than that it would have to turn out as it has in Europe now, since, I would like to say, for centuries materialism, rooted in the most diverse living conditions, produced the impulses that are now there. The beginning of the 19th century still saw the Napoleonic campaigns across European soil. I do not want to talk about them, but I want to draw attention to one thing that we must write in our souls when we are carried away by what the individual hears: a saying that Napoleon said to the Austrian Chancellor Metternich:

"You, Metternich, were never a soldier and therefore do not know what goes on in a soldier's soul. I came of age on the battlefield; a man of my stamp does not care in the least whether a million soldiers have to bite the dust. I spared the French wherever I could. Of the 300,000 men that Moscow cost me, only 30,000 were French. As long as I could, I sent Germans and Poles into the fire...

I think we have come a little further than we were at the time when Napoleon, of the 300,000 people who lost their lives at Moscow, sent not Frenchmen but Germans and Poles into the fire.

“Any weak-kneed protection of human life is a dangerous mistake in war. That Louis XIV turned the Palatinate into a scene of fire was not, as our miserable histories gossip, worthy of blame, but of the highest praise. But the glory of this act belongs not to the king, but to the minister Louvois.”

Goethe, who was undoubtedly intimately connected with the whole of modern intellectual life, was not inclined to underestimate the man who cherished this attitude. Goethe, who was therefore accused of unpatriotism by lesser minds, hurled the words at all those who reproached him for it: “The man is too great for you.”

Yes, my dear friends, objectivity does exist. As Hegel was writing his Phenomenology of Spirit, the thunder of the French cannons was rolling near Jena; and as he watched Napoleon ride past his window, he said: “It is nevertheless an uplifting feeling to see the world soul riding past on horseback at your window.” He was the great master whose military writings and sentiments are still studied in all European war colleges to learn what he thought about war. One must not forget how Europe learned war.

Goethe had a different view of revolution from that of the German princes. This is clear from the words he wrote in Verdun in 1792:

"Between order and disorder, between preservation and ruin, between plundering and paying, one lives after all, and this may well be what actually makes war pernicious for the mind. One plays the bold, destructive part, and then again the gentle, invigorating one; one gets used to phrases in the midst of the desperate state of inspiring hope and invigorating. This gives rise to a kind of hypocrisy that has a special character and is quite distinct from the priestly, courtly – or whatever else they may be called – quite distinct.

My dear friends, the certainty of recognizing the great necessity of spiritual science can plant that in our soul.

We can see what historical necessities are at hand, we can see how I and consciousness soul, mind and soul of mind and soul, under the influence of the impulses of which has been spoken, could give the world such a picture as we now have before us. It is wrong to apply the everyday standard to these things, and wistfully, I may say, it may make one's heart sink when one has experienced what I have already modestly related to you.

This book, the second volume of my work Die Rätsel der Philosophie (The Riddles of Philosophy), was completed up to page 206. From page 199 to page 204, it deals with French philosophy as represented by Boutroux and Bergson. The book was finished up to this point. It could only be printed during the war. I hope that you will be convinced that, just like everything else, French philosophy by Mr. Boutroux and Mr. Bergson has been treated objectively.

It makes one's heart ache to hear the words as they are spoken by the West and to see what is happening in Europe. One then realizes how much needs to be done for the spiritual life and how much to struggle to be objective.

But there are other things that confront you, my dear friends. I have had a lot to go through in the last few weeks, I have seen and experienced many things. It is remarkable how karma manifests itself in the smallest details of the day.

When I was traveling from Vienna to Salzburg, I happened to come across an Austrian magazine dated September 1, 1914, at a train station. In addition to many other articles, this magazine contains a piece written by Robert Michel while he was in the field. So a soldier in the field wrote this article. He describes how the soldiers were loaded into the wagons, how they were sent into the field, how many were wounded and fell, how the Samaritans came and so on. I do not need to elaborate further. But the conclusion of this article speaks deeply to my heart. I will read this conclusion to you in context. Pay attention to one sentence and listen to the remarkable thing that is said to us:

"But every single person left behind in the monarchy has a duty to support them to the best of their ability until the victorious decision has been made. All the good words, hearty cheers and blessings that were bestowed on the troops as they left increased their courage and confidence, they were tiny splinters of strength that were by no means lost. This boost of mental strength must continue to be given to the poor, and the will to win must be passed from each individual to the fighters at the front. Therefore, let no one rush ahead of the decision that is being prepared in the north. Those who are lucky enough to be able to actively help should stretch their strength to the utmost. But those who must idly watch the tremendous power of the army and the empire should try to contribute their mite on the path that Scelic forces are taking: those whom God hears, pray; those who cannot pray, he should gather all his thoughts and willpower into a fervent desire for victory; and he who can do nothing else should press his fingers into the palms of his hands and say: We must go, we must win! ... In this way, the least and weakest will also have contributed to the victory that we are preparing to fight for, even if it is with the sacrifice of our last drop of blood!"

What education! For years we have spoken of the reality of the powers of thought and will. Here it comes back to us like an echo: “Those who cannot pray should gather all their powers of thought and will in a fervent desire for victory.”

I have to think of what I said to you last time. I said that human evolution must progress; by a certain point something must give way. To do this, it is necessary that in our time a certain amount of selflessness and willingness to sacrifice is achieved. Our spiritual science knows that this must come, but whether it is heard is another question. What must happen, must happen.

And now the second great teacher enters the stage. Does he not teach people what seems like an echo of what we have been saying from soul to soul for years – the appeal to the reality of the powers of thought and will?

We must only find the possibility, through all our efforts and through a non-arrogant nature, to rise to the greatness that the problem of our time presents.

How could it not be self-evident, my dear friends, that what occurs as a force between individual human souls should also occur in the external world, and that we must preserve it so that we can judge great things with a healthy view, that is the sense of justice and truth.

The world will only learn the truth about past events little by little. Our spiritual science gives us guidelines for everything, if only we want to use them to find the right tones and nuances of feeling in our hearts, as far as possible removed from all criticism. But understanding must

s achieved who but, my dear friends, how, under the influence of the other impulses, the constellation has arisen in such a way that, on the one hand, what has come as materialism can neither be lived out differently nor fought differently than as it happens. We must take things objectively, we must be clear about the fact that only the lack of spiritual impulses has gradually led to the surfacing of nationality principles based in instincts rather than in spirituality. We must be clear that only by freeing ourselves from this instinctual life can we move forward.

And how can our Russian friends, embraced by our hearts, not consider that the noble Russian people today must especially take to heart the spiritual science that will enable those who want to see things objectively and clearly to truly distinguish between the great task of this people and has been conjured up by an excessive imperialism, by an excessive materialism, which only wants to make up for a defeat by attacking European culture, and what has been conjured up by the foolish and mendacious talk of Pan-Slavism. Our Russian friends, who have our full support, must gain the conviction from the humanities that they must distinguish between the noble forces that lie in their nationality and the collaboration with what is not fundamental to their national soul, with what has happened in such a terrible way, to justify which would represent a lack of inner objectivity.

They [you?] will find each other in their hearts and minds if they [you?] keep an open mind for objectivity, for the objective.

I know, my dear friends, that there is a way and that there is ground – if you just look for it – on which our English friends can judge the statesman Grey just as I judge him. This ground exists, and it is the most sacred task, the most sacred task, to find this ground. If we find it, we will understand this structure, which we laid the foundation stone for a year ago. We will find the paths from soul to soul, from heart to heart.

The present is also expressed through something else. I only need to give a few figures to show the contrast we are facing. I am not criticizing these figures, far from it. But we must be aware of the figures, because figures speak for themselves, and since we live in a neutral country, I will use the figures of this neutral country.

My dear friends, we face each other according to our principle: heart to heart, soul to soul. What stands in Europe facing us? There is no rejection in this, no blaming criticism. In Europe, we face each other on the field that we looked out on a year ago as such a peaceful field. Now we face each other with fighting armies in their wartime strength, and this wartime strength speaks a clear language. First, France has a war strength of 4,372,000 men; second, Germany has 4,350,000 men; third, Russia has 3,615,000 men; fourth, Austria-Hungary has 1,872,178 men; fifth, England has 1,081,294 men.

To get a sense of the statistics, let's compare Germany, Austria, Hungary and France with Russia and England. Germany, Austria and Hungary, where the ego comes to life, have a total wartime strength of 62,221,780 men. France, Russia and England have a total of 9,068,694 men. The peacetime strength shows somewhat different numbers. At that time, when there was still peace, it amounted to 655,899 men for Germany, 414,679 men for Austria-Hungary, a total of 1,070,578 men, compared to 609,865 men for France, 1,384,000 men for Russia, and 254,968 men for England, a total of 2,248,833 men. The latter three empires thus had more than twice as much as Germany and Austria-Hungary in peacetime.

My dear friends, I would rather not comment on these figures, because it is difficult to do so at this time. It is really necessary that we let these official figures, which I have not taken from any of the individual states, but from this country, which is neutral to our satisfaction and where we are allowed to be with our construction with thanks, have an effect on us. I will not add anything to these figures. They speak of the necessity that the world now faces. It is necessary for us to be objective. No matter how trivial this truth may sound, I am not afraid to emphasize it again and again, because I know how difficult it will be to be objective in this time, justifiably difficult, naturally difficult, excusably difficult! After all, one can only see what is closest.

But, my dear friends, let us allow the spiritual science within us to be a truth! Let us not forget that what we have worked for over the years is not a game. Let us not forget, my dear friends, that we have no right, after having gone through all this and looking into the structure of the interrelationships of the folk soul, to fall back on the words of a Maeterlinck, who only drew his wisdom from Novalis and is now taking such a strange and ungrateful stand on current events. It is heartbreaking to see how he reflects what he has drawn from Novalis. It is heartbreaking, but I say it without bitterness. And it may be received without bitterness, even though today, of course, we are confronted in the outer world with what has really occurred after every outbreak of war: that it was always the other person's fault. That was always the case and, of course, it is the case today. That is understandable.

But for us it should not be about the guilt of the other, but about the realization of the necessity of existence and, in the second place, about what necessarily arises from our spiritual striving. It should be about learning to distinguish between those who made the war - these will not be the nations, but individual people, cliques and so on - and those who have to endure the war.

I would rather just hint at this as a question today, my dear friends. Let us build on what spiritual science can give us. In it we will find the possibility of coming together across all boundaries, from soul to soul, and we will grow stronger and stronger in forging this bond that leads from soul to soul. We will not grow stronger in this if we are unjust and unobjective towards individual nations, but [we will grow stronger] if we really find the hill, the spiritual hill, on which our judgment and our feeling, [like] our building, to which we laid the foundation stone with sacred feelings a year ago, stands symbolically on a hill.

That is my constant yearning now, the thought I pursue and which I would very much like to share with those of our friends who have some of the insights that I believe I have gained from the spiritual world.

You know that I do not want to claim authority, but I will say over and over again what lives in me as my faith, my conviction, my knowledge, as that which I myself have experienced and must experience anew every day and every hour: May our spiritual current may our spiritual current pass the test that must now be passed, by acquiring the right feeling and objectivity towards the events we are now experiencing; by acquiring feelings that exclude injustice towards the individual nations that are now fighting each other.

That is some of what I wanted to say to you at the present time.

My dear friends!

Today I would like to say a few words in advance about the thoughts that have come to me in the wake of the laying of the foundation stone of our building. Here in this place, we want to remember once more the man who is so intimately connected with everything that concerns our spiritual movement: Christian Morgenstern.

It is, my dear friends, not without an inner spiritual connection that Christian Morgenstern is commemorated precisely at the commemoration of our laying of the foundation stone. The last collection of Christian Morgenstern's poems, which was only published after he left the physical plane, is entitled We found a path. Christian Morgenstern found the path he refers to by approaching it, approaching it more and more, and finally standing completely within it in what we call our spiritual stream, our spiritual science and our spiritual life. And what is expressed in that volume is completely imbued with the feelings, with the living ideas that Christian Morgenstern experienced in connection with our spiritual movement. It meant a lot to him that he chose this title: We found a path.

But Christian Morgenstern also had a sense of how to express symbolically how he was connected to our movement. And that is what we also do when we commemorate the laying of our foundation stone. It did not come to that, but this last collection of poems, published with the passing away of Christian Morgenstern from the physical plane, should have included – in Christian Morgenstern's opinion – an illustration of our as yet unfinished main entrance. And we found that a path should have been able to find symbolic expression in the title picture, saying, as it were: He who enters into the feelings that are laid down here in this book will find the way through the gate through which one enters the Dornach building.

So Christian Morgenstern's soul is intimately, intimately connected with the one with whom we also feel so intimately connected. I don't know if all our dear friends have heard what I had to say in some of our branches, some time after Christian Morgenstern left the physical plane. It may sound so strange because it is perhaps too simple a word for the thing I mean: with Christian Morgenstern it came so vividly to my mind how one can get to know people in a completely different way than in the physical life, when one is able to see them after they have left the physical plane. There are many things that my soul now feels close to Christian Morgenstern's soul. I do not want to include the little poem that was added by Margareta Morgenstern on May 13, 1912, in the copy of the poems intended for me, with the beautiful features of Christian Morgenstern, written by him in pencil. But without offending modesty, I may perhaps share the last two lines of this unpublished poem in a certain context here, in connection with me. As I said, it is not out of immodesty, but because I want to come to an occult fact, be it said. In connection with me, insofar as I have to represent this spiritual movement to Christian Morgenstern through my personality. In this regard, the poem concludes with the words

And in my fourfold form
they wrote their cross as a silent stop.

Yes, my dear friends, it was one of the most beautiful, one of the most uplifting and exalted tasks of our spiritual movement to inscribe the Holy Cross, the symbol of our movement, as a silent hold in this four-fold form. And now I often find Christian Morgenstern meditating. And these lines, with those that precede this little poem, always form, so to speak, what is a mediation of the path to this soul. And this soul can be found meditating in many places. That was the peculiarity of this soul, that it really sought the spiritual path to our spiritual movement in the most dignified and earnest way through the gate, the symbol of which was to be on the last collection of poems. And that resonates, even now.

And I only needed to quote one poem that had already appeared in the collection published by Christian Morgenstern in 1911 to then find this soul in its current state. However, a poem that, in its unpretentiousness – I would like to use Goethe's word – “offenbar geheimnisvoll” (apparently mysterious), shows Christian Morgenstern's peculiar place in our movement. After all, Christian Morgenstern was basically as prepared as possible for our movement before he entered its reality, full of longing for the spiritual life, and at the same time ready to take it up to the full. I would like to say that this poem is the one that sheds light on the life of Christian Morgenstern, both before and after. It is so taken from his whole being, as this being was before he entered through our gate, and yet in the last line in such a way that it presents the glorious earthly end to the soul's eye in a certain way. This is the title of this poem:

The animal, the plant, these beings still had
the inhuman patience of the earth;
there was a year, which today is only a second.

Now nothing can happen fast enough for them.
Man began to become impatient.
She senses: Now at last the great hour has come:

I have been breeding myself for millions of years for this.
Now I no longer need to spare my body,
now I will soon be hanging on God's word as a ghost.

I had to emphasize, my dear friends, how the forms of our construction strive for our soul to cling to the mouth of the gods. The soul of Christian Morgenstern, characterizing its own destiny, speaks the words at the end of the poem: “Now I will soon be a ghost hanging on God's mouth.”

Indeed, this soul was well prepared to carry into the spiritual worlds what it was able to absorb to such a full extent here in the earthly world. And so Christian Morgenstern's spiritual body also appeared to me in such a way that woven into his spiritual garment now after death is that which he absorbed here on earth from our spiritual movement in terms of cosmic truths and secrets. This is now like his body, and it is one of the most profound experiences I have had in the spiritual worlds: to see what I strove to find in this earthly incarnation spread out in the spiritual worlds, as in an artistic painting, and to see it interwoven with Christian Morgenstern's spiritual garment. Just as a painting by a genius gives us something in addition to nature, so the spiritual body of a human being gives us something in addition to what is spread out in the field of spiritual life. Truly, this soul remains with us, that may be said, and also accompanies that which is to be the symbol of our spiritual life, the foundation stone of which we laid a year ago.

I wanted to preface this with these words, and now some of Christian Morgenstern's poems, inspired by the immediate spiritual life, are to be recited; and at the end, I will take the liberty of making a further observation that may be suitable to enliven our thoughts a little on this day of remembrance of the laying of the foundation stone.

[A recitation of poems by Christian Morgenstern followed.]

If my intention was to commemorate Christian Morgenstern today, it is connected with the whole way in which Christian Morgenstern, from his own intellectual life, which he lived through before he joined our current, approached this our intellectual movement. And this way of Christian Morgenstern's is, in a sense, only an isolated case, a representative case of impulses, of forces and elements that can be felt in the whole of modern intellectual life, and which were particularly on my mind when we laid the foundation stone for our building a year ago today.

At the time, at the site where our foundation stone was laid, I had to point out how something should be done, how something should be built with this building, that would meet the longings, the spiritual hopes of individual people in the present, and would do so more and more in the future. Unconsciously, it had to be emphasized, the longing for the spiritual life contained in our spiritual current hovers in the souls. The souls long for this spiritual life, they just don't know it. And something would be given, it was emphasized, not out of the arbitrariness of a person or a society, but out of the signs of the times, out of what the time is driving towards, what the souls of the time are striving for, unconsciously perhaps most , those souls who, even for this or that reason, behave very negatively towards the form in which the newer spiritual life, the newer spiritual current, must make its entry into world history.

When I had finished the second volume of my Riddle of Philosophy, the aim was that after almost thirteen years of our spiritual movement, the last chapter should contain a reference to our anthroposophy. Of course, on the few pages that could be devoted to actual spiritual science, only a few of the rich contents that have been on our minds for so many years could be hinted at. The question naturally had to arise for me: What is the most important thing that must first enter into the souls of modern people?

The most important thing that must move in is the realization that there is a spiritual life that dwells and weaves in man independently of the human body, and that this spiritual life is the same that unfolds from embodiment to embodiment in repeated lives on earth. If we leave aside everything else that has passed through our soul, these two truths are such that, one might say, they still move into modern spiritual life as something completely alien. They appear foolish and fantastic to the materialistic mind, contradicting all the scientific spirit of modern times. That is how they appear to the materialistic mind; but a soul that has truly participated in the longings and hopes, in the forces and impulses of modern spiritual life, drinks them in to the full. That soul has cheered ed for the return of spiritual proclamation, and who has suffered from the spiritual life of our time, from the impossibility of taking something from the outer life that justifies speaking of a spiritual world, despite all modern science.

Such a thing can only remain suspended in the spiritual atmosphere for a while, one might say. But then comes the age when such a thing penetrates into the sphere of everyday life itself. And here is the point where the matter of our spiritual movement is directly announced as that which must become the affair of the heart of mankind in the most intimate sense of the word. Today one can still speak as if our spiritual movement were only of interest to a few individual souls, as if it were only for those souls who could feel what must enter into modern spiritual life. But the time is already upon us when souls will become desolate because the spiritual atmosphere, under the influence of materialism, gives them no vitality.

You, my dear friends, have all reached the age where so much remains of the more or less spiritual impulses of a more spiritual past that your souls cannot yet be so desolate, that your souls are still searching for the spiritual world, but do not know the desolation that will come upon the next generation if the spiritual impulse of spiritual culture does not flow into humanity. Those who are young children today will face a life that will constantly ask them - not in theory, but in life itself - the question: What is the meaning of life? Why this bleak existence?

And in the future, the pale faces of those who are young children today, distorted by the hardships and worries of life, will stand before our souls in horror, unable to see anything in the material world that can comfort the soul in the face of the desolation that can only take hold in a person's life if materialism is the only thing that exists. Then, my dear friends, there comes that great compassion, that all-embracing sympathy that swells in the soul, that empathy with those who will come and who can only find the earth worth living in if the spiritual atmosphere of this earth is prepared by that which spiritual science can give.

I said: Among the most important things that humanity must first understand is the doctrine of repeated lives on earth. A time will come when man who does not know about repeated lives on earth, who has not heard of it, will face life as the most desolate. In individual souls, which are connected with the whole of modern spiritual life, this idea emerged; so it emerged, that if you want to describe how it emerged, you have to say: There are souls that ask themselves: How do we cope with life in the peculiar phenomena that confront us when we survey it? How do we cope?

Then there are souls who are immersed in modern spiritual life and say to themselves: Oh, at least in my imagination I must conjure up an idea of immortality that is initially very far removed from the materialistic consciousness of our time! This idea of immortality sometimes comes to us in the strangest places in modern spiritual life. I would like to point out one such instance as a symptom. On another occasion, I have pointed out to the same modern personality that this idea of immortality does arise in him. But you will see from the very first sentence how it arises!

Herman Grimm, the excellent actor of modern times, a personality with whom I was privileged to exchange many words, once wrote - one might say, strangely enough - the following words in an essay that was actually about a completely different topic:

It is conceivable that the spirit of a human being, released from the bonds of the body, might hover above the earth like a mere mirror of what is happening.

Now, one might say, the hesitation comes:

I am not stating an article of faith here, it is only a fantasy.

But this fantasy is necessary:

Let us assume that for some people, immortality takes this form: they float above the earth, unencumbered by what previously blinded them, and all the destinies of the earth and of mankind from the birth of the planet are revealed to them. The past would be a fabric of harmonious beauty to them. Every thought of a heart would be a necessary part of it, every deed that we call good or condemn, the falling of a tree leaf and the collapse of entire cities, under which the ground begins to move, everything would have the same rank among the events, because it was the same single force that moved everything. Now suddenly, let's dream on...

Herman Grimm does not dare to grasp the thought as reality –

... this spirit, which so freely surveyed things, would be forced to rejoin the body of a mortal human. If this human had the highest talents of every kind, would only the memory of the previous state be possible?

The idea of re-embodiment! Now he develops the thought of how the soul, which he first imagined hovering above the earth in a disembodied state, would have to return to an earthly body.

It would be born in a certain age. It would have a father and a mother, a fatherland, a class, a heart that loves and hates, vanities, pains, joys, vexation, despair, delight – when, even for a moment, would it be capable of the free clarity that was once its element? He would begin to doubt whether he had ever really enjoyed freedom, and the memory of it would soon be compressed into a dark presentiment, hidden deep within his soul. While he usually had the hearts of men before him like a glass beehive, where he saw thoughts flying in and out and working, now he must divine them as secrets.

And so on. These are the passages, my dear friends, in which we encounter the yearning of modern man for what we want, and which, in the form in which it must first appear before humanity, seems so unlikely to this humanity. Our building and our work on it is, as it were, the vow that we want to work devotedly to study the longings and hopes of modern man in order to find from the spiritual world that which can meet these longings, these hopes. I had to express this when the foundation stone was laid a year ago.

I would also like to quote from another passage, from Herman Grimm. Do people today look at the history of the past, at historical life and development, purely in terms of the course of external facts? And materialism has increasingly come to regard it in this way. If we compare what is called history today with what we are trying to describe as the successive life in the post-Atlantic era, it becomes clear how little can be understood in our materialistic times, even in historical matters. This is what must come and for which our building is intended to be a symbol. But the longing for it is there, the deep longing! In a little-known essay by Herman Grimm, there are words that are particularly valuable to me because they basically reflect a conversation I once had with Herman Grimm in Weimar. Herman Grimm said that an expansion of the concept of history was imminent:

A world-historical change is taking place before our eyes today, the like of which has not been seen in any period of history, as far as we are able to survey it. The peoples of Europe are suddenly demanding to be left to their own devices. The mutual influence of the races on each other is to be completely denied in theory and minimized in practice. And this new view is not the fruit of a doctrine propounded by the learned, but of a natural impulse that is shaking peoples to their very depths. It does not emerge in the individual, but moves the masses. Something has secretly ripened and the latest events are the storm that shakes it from the tree. There is a universal law by which great masses of people repel and attract each other, connected with their ability to bring about general spiritual progress either by coming together or by isolating themselves. What we today generally call history is the story of the coexistence of peoples, which the peninsula of Europe, attached to western Asia, has held over the course of the last three or four thousand years.

Regarding the conception of history, Herman Grimm once said that he foresaw a time when all those regarded as great in the 19th century would no longer be regarded as such, but quite different people would emerge from the twilight of time. History has developed in such a way that, in order to judge it today, a transformation of the human soul is necessary, a transformation that reaches down to the very roots of its life. From this point of view, I have emphasized this again and again, but it cannot be said often enough.

Yes, my dear friends, it is impossible to gain from what modern spiritual life has to offer without our spiritual science what we long for here. A new history is sought, a new view of historical development, which is characterized by the words I have just read. But this longing cannot be fulfilled anywhere because the elements, the forces, the impulses for it are lacking. One would like to say: As a yearning, it is present, present in the best of our time, which we strive for as the fulfillment of this yearning.

But what strikes me as particularly profound is the connection between this yearning and what we, in all modesty, strive for when I consider how art itself has taken this path through humanity; when I consider that to him [Herman Grimm] history was an evolution of the imagination. That there are imaginations in humanity that flow unconsciously into humanity in order to be realized in human activity, that history is based on inspiration and intuition, could not be realized by him. For him, it was the imaginative work of nations. He could only gradually replace Maya with what he called the imaginative work of nations, not with what must present itself to the human spirit if it is to find the way up from the physical world into the spiritual. Only later will we truly understand what it meant for the 19th century when Herman Grimm says: What can we find particularly interesting in the way history has presented Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar – Herman Grimm says – interests me much more as he is portrayed by Shakespeare. That is truer than anything a modern historian writes about him.

He repeatedly pointed out how much he likes to read Tacitus: because he is a person who knows how to bring to life what he has to describe, to transform it into the spiritual. And so, from such a premise, a wonderful thought arose, such as that which Herman Grimm wrote down in the nineties and which is in his book on Homer, a thought that really stands there as an anticipation of what was to come as a message from the hierarchies.

[Gap in the text]. How this art took its starting point from the spiritual revelations that came down to people in the primeval culture of nations from the spiritual fathers themselves, how then that which lay in the primeval culture of nations , by the Christ impulse, how this Christ impulse also made its way into artistic forms, but how we then came to a deadlock, to that deadlock in artistic development in particular, at which humanity now stands. It pains me to have settled into the lives of those artists who, from the bottom of their hearts, tried to find what would give modern art spirit again. The life of the serious artist in particular has become tragic, and it stands tragically even before world history, because there is the search for something that can also enter into forms, and because this search can only be met by that which comes from a real, genuine grasp of the spiritual world. How does human longing find itself, how it is rooted in the deeper feelings of precisely those who suffer from modern culture, how it finds itself in harmony with what our spiritual movement is able to give! We have to think back to the Stuttgart cycle 'Before the Gate of Theosophy', where I spoke of Christian initiation and gave the example of foot washing as the first stage.

Many years have passed since we spoke out of the spiritual, how the plant must incline towards the stone, as it owes it the ground of existence; in the same way, the animal inclines towards the plant, and the human being towards the animal, up to the hierarchies of the spirits! This also lived in Christian Morgenstern's yearning. It united harmoniously with what was spoken, and we hear an echo of what was given to the yearning, what spiritual science was able to give to the yearning. We hear it echo in the poem that we heard today, 'The Washing of Feet': 'I thank you, you mute stone...'

It gives me an idea of how what is the best of human longing in this modern age will grow together with what spiritual science has to give us. These longings will flow into our perceptions, into our ideas, into our entire intellectual life. But, as I said, it pains me to look at those artists who sought content for their art. Carstens, Overbeck, Cornelius: they sought to bring the Christ impulse into their art - but it was in vain. Just study a life as tragic as that of Cornelius, who was so close to Herman Grimm: He sought to find the living Christ-life in the form that Christianity had taken, in the form that could penetrate his soul and flow into his art. But he lived in the dead center. Just look at modern architecture: we are not walking through the artistically created, but through the preserved, prepared herbarium of old art styles. Only the living connection with the Christ Impulse will be able to infuse these art forms with life, but only the living Christ Impulse, which penetrates into the forms through what has flowed into people through the Mystery of Golgotha. For it is not by merely speaking of Him that the forms come to life, without which human life is dead in art as well.

All we have been able to do, both with our spiritual movement and with our building, is no more than a beginning; the very first beginning of a building style that is to come, that must come. But that is precisely what we are trying to do with our spiritual movement: to take up the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha into our souls, to take it up completely, and to take it up in such a way that future humanity will need it.

In this context, I must also mention a word that Herman Grimm has just spoken in an essay, in which he divides human development – I have already mentioned this in the Hague cycle – into three millennia: one before the Mystery of Golgotha, then the millennium of the Mystery of Golgotha, and one after. Today of all days, I would like to call to mind the words with which Herman Grimm characterized the second millennium, for these words once again show something of the longings of modern man. They are words that can penetrate deeply into the soul if one looks straight at what lives in the hopes of the new age and what, in essence, can only be fertilized by spiritual science.

The second millennium: Christ stands before us here in two forms. First, as the creeds of the religions allow him to appear:

[...] Christ cannot be placed in a row with other great men as an historical personality. He towers above them and is surrounded by an aura of inviolability. Therefore, many treat the great phenomena of history apart from Christ. They assume Christ's relation to everything else as being recognized. But we cannot avoid him, since he and the personalities connected with him are encountered at every turn, and since even the all-powerful spiritual forces that lived before Christ, I mention Socrates or Plato, can only be understood in comparison with him today.

A high-ranking man who admired him is said to have demanded that Christ be introduced into world history as the author of all human destinies. This demand, it is reported, caused the scholar to experience severe inner struggles, but was ultimately rejected on the grounds that the given explanation had to suffice. Christ appears to us in world history in two forms: as the founder of Christianity and as the superhuman Son of God, as the church teaches.

I consider this dual nature of Christ to be historically untenable. We do not have to explain Christ, but to accept him and the effect of his teaching as a fact. Christ's works are to be incorporated into the report of the course of world events. In Roman political history, the birth and earthly life of Christ belong as an event of world-transforming power, and should not be relegated to church history as a special chapter. The teaching of Christ has been effective from Christ's appearance.

Titus did not destroy Jerusalem only because of it, but it is to blame for the fact that from the reign of Augustus onwards Latin and Greek poetry and the fine arts moved down from the heights because the innermost lifeblood is missing from them from that point on.

Attempts to depict Christ as the most beautiful, most divine of men soon began, and reached their zenith in Raphael's paintings. This took many centuries, but the direction towards this goal is recognizable. Raphael's importance would be incalculable if history were conceived differently, while at the same time no one who conceives of recent history in this way, whether as a writer or a reader, would be compelled to confess or even hint at his own thoughts about Christ if he did not want to.

For it is our human right to do these things in private. Scholars whose work has consisted in investigating Greek history have looked at it in the broadest sense with such enthusiasm that zealots could accuse them of having pagan beliefs. Nothing could be less justified. The development of the Greek spirit is just as beautiful and worthy of knowledge as that of the moving universe, or that of a flower, or that of any law in the field of chemistry.

If we are looking for a reason why Ranke might have doubted for a while whether or not to hold on to the double historical figure of Chrisü, then perhaps it is also about particular inclinations that should be considered in every historian [...] He then easily lifts us up, but this height is not the highest [...] One should find out what he intentionally left unmentioned in his history of the popes [...] He may have been flattered by those who wanted to rise through him, but he renounced purchased praise and loved quiet, untrodden paths where he met no one. When a man like that, growing very old, takes in everything that has happened, his world view has lasting value. But the future does not reveal it.

We feel that new world conditions are forming. Nothing spiritual has remained untouched by them. A veil is already falling over the 19th century: a something that forms a perceptible barrier between us and the recent past. Again and again the question arises secretly and aloud: Where do we want to go, where do we have to go? This uncertainty prevails in all areas of human existence. It produces strange new considerations. Transformation is taking place before our eyes [...].

Consider, my dear friends: a person who strives to find spiritual life in the life of humanity, who even sees the Christ in two forms, but does not want to speak of the form that is not simply human! For Herman Grimm continues:

I believe that for the history of the future, the beginnings of the community he founded point to the Christ as a historically established power of the highest order, as the real living force in human history. The history of Christ, the growing authority of his ideas and general political progress form an intricate web. Raphael's inner urge to depict Christ himself and his experiences did not arise from any coincidences, but from his national-Italian nature [...] We are giving the book that is most widely read today, translated into all the languages of the world: the New Testament, compatible with other books of national origin. These other books are recognized at the same time as the Gospels as a source of our spiritual uplift and education, although there seems to be an unbridgeable gap between them and the Gospels.

These other books, in contrast to the dubious authors of the Gospels, have certain authors who live on at the same time as their works. The most distinguished of them were poets, others were visual artists, alongside them were philosophers who observed nature, and the series is concluded by statesmen and generals. These men of the highest national rank have ruled over nations stretching back to the distant past, and their relationship to national character and to the teachings of international Christianity determines their presence and future everywhere today. A wonderful contrast.

Christ knows only humanity without distinction, whose salvation he sacrificed himself for. [ ] The most powerful men known to the millennia of human history have been five poets living before and after Christ: David, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe. An Oriental, a Greek, an Italian and two Germans. Their careers and poetic powers are very different, but their works have a scope and impact that continues to grow. They also resemble each other in that we can most deeply penetrate their souls critically. For these five we know best of all people's earlier lives. Yes, one could say we alone know them. For we do not know Christ. We gaze at him in awe.

But where is the possibility of presenting the Christ to humanity in a new form? - to present him in such a way that one will no longer need to say: “These five we know best of all people's previous lives. Yes, one could say that we alone know them. For we do not know Christ. We gaze at him in awe.

When humanity decides to accept the spiritual form of Christ in its hearts, the time will have come for which people yearn, because they cannot yet see the form that Christ must take if he is to fulfill their longings. When one enters the path that leads to spiritual science, one will find the possibility to speak about the Christ in such a way that life, content, and certainty will enter into human souls, that certainty which is at the same time the certainty of peace itself. For is it not like a question that is posed but still stands without an answer when Herman Grimm says: he believes that - for the history of the future - the formation of the first Christian community as the actual living element of human history points to the Christ as a historically firmly established power of the highest order.

Spiritual science is the answer to such questions, the answer that must be given today. For it is precisely with regard to the contemplation of Christ that humanity has arrived at a dead end. Herman Grimm felt it rightly when he said that he only had the questions but not the answers! The answers will have to be kept back as long as it is not firmly grounded in spiritual science.

But how it is also, my dear friends, with the placing of this Christ-figure in the culture of the present still! How far is still that, what pulsates through the present souls, from what we must seek as this Christ-figure! Indeed, it must be said that the unpleasantly that Herman Grimm spoke of in relation to the Christ biographers, confronts us more and more. For the way in which people of the present time seek to understand Christ on the basis of what external cultural life of the present still knows, has indeed more and more of the unpleasantly. The tones with which Christ was characterized in past centuries are worn out and can no longer live in the modern soul. New tones and new modes are needed for this very purpose. Therefore, we see how the representations of Christ become more and more unpleasant and unpleasant if these representations of Christ cannot draw from what spiritual science is meant to open up for humanity. They become increasingly unpleasant and unedifying the closer they approach the present day. I would say that we have experienced the most unpleasant thing in a portrayal of Christ in the very bad drama of a grand duke, which represents a blasphemy of everything that happened through and around Christ, and which so clearly demonstrates the low point in the portrayal of that which happened through Christ. How our spiritual life, according to the means of the present, leads to the impossible: this is precisely what this abominable Christ drama shows, which is actually an anti-Christ drama in its whole attitude. But from the spiritual life of the present, longings are developing that are good soil and are becoming more and more good soil from which to sprout what we strive to put into it as seeds, into this soil full of hopes and longings, in this soil in which the hopes and longings of those who already live as young children today must be transformed into certainties, and are condemned to live unhappily unless spiritual science comes among humanity.

We see the yearnings everywhere, we see them also in the soil from which the unfortunate Christ drama, of which I have spoken, sprang. We also see the yearning for an understanding of this Christ impulse, but we also see, so to speak, the lack of understanding that is shown towards this true yearning for true understanding. I must confess that it was quite a strange feeling for me when I read the words that Solowjow wrote. I only discovered them recently; they made a particular impression on me. You can guess why! Various attacks have come from this or that side in recent times: I have been called a Jesuit from one side; I have been denounced as a Jew in another place; I therefore had to have my baptism certificate photographed.

Well, my dear friends, that does not matter, these are necessary side effects of being forced to say, albeit only in stammering words, what humanity needs. But those others who speak of the longing for a correct understanding of Christ have also been able to report a strange understanding that has been shown to them. Hence the words of Solowjow, spoken in 1886: “I am literally persecuted, my writings are banned because they are said to be harmful to Russia and Orthodoxy. Today I am said to be a Jesuit, tomorrow a Jew, and so on... so that one must be prepared for anything.”

My dear friends, some of what needs to be said as that which comes from the deepest, but also the most necessary longings and hopes of life, some of it has already been found harmful, and it is believed that it must not be allowed! Only when people of the present time come to understand the painful events of the present as a test, and in the sense that I was able to hint at yesterday, allow themselves to be led to a spiritual life, only then will they also recognize the necessity of these painful present events and learn to judge them differently than according to their immediate impression. Yes, my dear friends, it will always be possible to communicate with people who speak like Solowjow, one will find the way to them beyond all national differences. But it is not me, but Solowjow, a member of the Russian nation, of whom I spoke yesterday, the same Solowjow, who spoke words for those with whom there is such a close connection to what afflicts us so painfully today. It is he who characterizes this clique with the words: “Our state, church, and literary scoundrels are so brazen and the public is so foolish that one must expect anything.” Of course, he is talking about those who “absolutely banned” his writings.

My dear friends, today, as we stand before the unfinished building for which we laid the foundation stone a year ago, let us renew our pledge that we will remain true to what spiritual science can give us. Let us absorb the awareness that spiritual science can meet the longings and hopes, the needs of humanity. Let us absorb the consciousness that spiritual science will make it possible for humanity to speak of the Christ impulse in a way that even free spirits like Herman Grimm did not dare to speak of, just as it is necessary to speak of it, especially in view of the painful events of today. And let us absorb the consciousness that if we learn to speak rightly about the Christ, we learn rightly to speak about human history. For the Christ does not belong to one people, the Christ belongs to all people, the Christ did not speak to the members of one people: “You are my brother...” He spoke to the members of all humanity. We then find the way to every human being and to the peace choirs of all higher hierarchies, and find the way to the Christ.

This, my dear friends, must also be a foundation stone that we want to lay in our hearts, on which we want to build the invisible structure, for which the visible structure is the outer symbol. May this outer symbol, in a primitive, elementary way, but at least to some extent fulfill that which we attempted to implore from the world powers a year ago! May it be fulfilled for our good, that in these forms one may see how the spirit, which has communicated itself to the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, streams through our forms, takes hold of the forms, permeates them with the Christ impulse, so that the consciousness may permeate the soul, which is expressed in the words, which are still not understood deeply enough: Not I, but Christ in me! May this structure, too, upon people — even if it only imperfectly represents what is intended — may it at least to a small extent achieve what it wants: upon the human souls that enter it, make the impression: Not I, not my own is that which makes an impression on the eye through the outer forms... but the Christ wants to speak, who through the word of the higher hierarchies seeks an expression, a revelation. And the mouth shall be this structure!

May the souls, finding themselves in the spirit of this building, feel a little imbued with a similar feeling, which can be called: a feeling of the connection of the individual human soul with the soul of the earth, and of the feeling of how this soul of the earth lives today, how it has lived since the beginning of the earth, how it lives in all souls! May this soul then feel itself as a spirit at God's mouth, may this soul speak as Christian Morgenstern:

The animal, the plant, these beings still had
the inhuman patience of the earth;
there was a year, which today is only a second.

Now nothing can happen fast enough for them.
Man began to become impatient.
She senses: Now at last the great hour has come:

I have been breeding myself for millions of years for this.
Now I no longer need to spare my body,
now I will soon be hanging on God's word as a ghost.

May such feelings be able to enter the souls of more and more people when they become familiar with our designs! That is what our building is for. It should never be expected that it represents what it is supposed to be, even to a small degree of perfection: in its highest imperfection, it represents what it can represent of the hopes and longings of modern times. But even if we never dare to speak of the hour of laying the foundation stone as the great hour of world existence, but want to speak of it as the small hour of world existence, even if we say that we can only make a small, contribute a little to the great tasks of humanity, we still want to feel the great tasks of existence, to which, even with small means, we want to devote ourselves to what we laid the foundation for a year ago.

As awakeners of ancient memories, festivals turn our thoughts and feelings to the past. Through what they signify they awaken in us thoughts that link us to all that our souls held holy in distant ages. But other thoughts also are roused through the understanding of the content of these festivals, thoughts which turn our eyes to the future of mankind, which, for us, means the future of our own souls. Feelings are awakened which lend us the enthusiasm to live on into the future, and inspire our wills with strength so to work that we may grow ever more and more adequate for our future tasks.

It is with this backward and forward vision that we become able to describe, in the deeper sense of the word, the nature of the Whitsun festival. What it signifies for Western humanity is put before us in a mighty picture which speaks to the very depths of our soul. It is a picture we all know well. The Founder and Inaugurator of Christianity, after having accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha, dwelt for a time among those who were able to perceive Him, in that bodily form which He assumed after the Mystery of Golgotha. The events which followed that period are brought before our souls in a most significant series of pictures. In a mighty vision, known as the Ascension, His closest disciples visibly beheld the dissolution of that bodily form which He had assumed. Then ten days later there followed what is expressed for us in another picture, speaking powerfully to all hearts which have the will to understand it. The disciples of Christ are gathered together, those who were the first to understand Him. Deep in their hearts they feel the mighty impulse which through Him has entered into the evolution of humanity, and, after the promise given to them of the happenings they were to experience in their very souls, they are waiting in utmost expectation, gathered together in deepest devotion on the Day of Pentecost, the time-honoured festival of their people. First there takes place that which is presented in the picture of the “rushing mighty wind.” Through this their souls are lifted up into higher vision. They are summoned as it were to turn their gaze on what is yet to come to pass, on what will await them when, with the fire-impulse they have received into their hearts, they live on this earth in incarnation after incarnation in the future.

There is next portrayed before us the picture of the “tongues of fire” which descend upon the head of each of the disciples, and here another tremendous vision reveals to them what the future of this Christ Impulse is to be. For gathered together, and beholding in spirit the spiritual world, these men, who were the first to understand the Christ, feel as if they were not speaking to people near to them in space or in time: they feel their hearts borne far, far away, among the different peoples of the earth-sphere, and they feel as if something lives in their hearts which is translatable into all languages, and which can be brought to the understanding of the hearts of all men. In this mighty vision of the future of Christianity which rises before them, these first disciples feel themselves as though surrounded by future disciples out of all the peoples of the earth, and as if they will, one day, have the power to proclaim the Gospel in words that will be understandable, not only to those directly near to them in time and space, but to all who live on the earth as human beings conscious of their destiny. This it was which was born out of the first Christian Pentecostal festival as the inner content of soul and feeling of these earliest disciples of Christ.

Let us now consider the interpretation of these pictures in their deepest esoteric Christian meaning.—The Spirit, also rightly named the Holy Spirit—for so he is—sent his forces down to the earth in the first descent to the earth of Christ Jesus. He next manifested himself when Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist. Now, once again, this same Spirit, in another form, in the form of many single, shining, fiery tongues, descended upon each single individual of the first Christian believers.

We are told about this Holy Spirit at the Whitsun festival in a quite special way, but we must get clear in our minds the meaning of the words “Holy Spirit,” as they are used in the Gospels. In the first place, how was the Spirit usually spoken of in ancient times, the times preceding those of the Gospel? In olden times the Spirit was spoken of in many connections, but in one connection particularly. Through the new knowledge which Spiritual Science gives us, we are enabled to say that when a man passes through birth into his existence between birth and death, the body in which the individuality is incarnated is determined in two ways. Our bodily nature has actually a double function to fulfil: it makes us a human being, but it also makes us members of this or that people, this or that race or family. In the ancient times which preceded Christianity, little as yet was experienced of what can be called world-wide humanity, of that feeling of human fellowship which in ever greater measure has lived in human hearts only since Christianity was proclaimed, and which says to us: Thou art fellow-man with all the human beings of the earth! On the other hand, that feeling was all the stronger which makes each man a member of a particular people or tribe. This indeed is expressed in the age-long religion of the Hindus in their belief that only one who is such through his blood, can be a real Hindu. In many directions—despite exceptions to the principle—this was also firmly held by the old Hebrew people before the coming of Christ. According to their view, a man belonged to his people only because his parents, themselves belonging to it and so blood-related, had placed him into it. But they were also always familiar with another feeling, which was more or less felt by all peoples in olden times, namely, that one was a member of one's family, a member of one's own folk, and nothing more. The further we go back into antiquity the more intense this feeling is, the more the human being feels himself as a member of his folk, and not in any way as a single individual. Gradually, however, there awoke the feeling of oneself as a single human being, a single human, individuality with individual human qualities. Thus these two principles were felt to be present in the outer nature of man: membership of a people, and awareness of oneself as a single personality.

Now the forces inherent in these two principles were ascribed in a different way to the two parents. The principle by virtue of which one belonged more to one's folk, by virtue of which one was related to the general race-community, was ascribed through heredity to the mother. When men felt according to this idea, they said of the mother: “In her the Spirit of the folk holds sway. She was filled with the Spirit of the folk and has passed on to the child the qualities common to her people.” But of the father it was said that he was the bearer and transmitter of the principle which gave rather the individual, personal characteristics of the human being. Thus it could be said when a man came into the world through birth—and this was also the view of the old Hebrew people in pre-Christian times—that he was an individual personality through the forces of his father. The mother, however, through that which was special in her whole nature, was felt to be filled with the Spirit which held sway in the folk, and this she had handed on to the child. Thus it was said of the mother, that the Spirit of the folk dwelt in her, and it was in this connection that the Spirit was spoken of who sent his forces down out of spiritual realms into humanity—that he let his forces stream down into the physical world, into humanity, by way of the mother.

Through the Christ Impulse, however, a new conception had come—a conception which said that this Spirit of which men had previously spoken, this Spirit of the folk, was to be replaced by one which, though certainly related to it, worked at a far higher level, a Spirit which is related to the whole of mankind, as the earlier Spirit had been related to a particular people. This Spirit was to be given to man and to fill him with the power to say: “I feel I belong no longer only to a part of humanity, but to the whole of it; I am a member of the whole of mankind, and will become a member of it ever more and more!” This force, which poured a universal human quality over the whole of mankind, was attributed to “the Holy Spirit.” Thus the Spirit which was expressed in the force which flowed from the folk into the mother was raised from ‘Spirit’ to ‘Holy Spirit.’

The One who was to bring mankind the power to develop this universal human nature ever more and more in earthly life, could dwell—as the first Being of this nature—only in a body bequeathed through the power of the Holy Spirit. This the mother of Jesus received in the Annunciation. In the Gospel of St. Matthew we hear of the consternation of Joseph, of whom it is said that he was a ‘righteous’ man. This word was used in the old sense, and meant that he was one who could only believe that any child of his would be born out of the Spirit of his people. Now he has discovered that the mother of his child is filled, is penetrated through and through (for this is the right meaning of the original word in our language), by the power of a Spirit that was not merely a folk-Spirit, but the Spirit of universal humanity! And he did not feel that he could live with a woman who might one day bear him children, when there dwelt in her the Spirit of humanity as a whole and not the Spirit he held to in his righteousness. Accordingly he wished as it says, to put her away privily. It was only when he also had received a communication out of the spiritual world, that he received the strength to decide to have a son by that woman who was penetrated and filled with the power of this Holy Spirit.

Thus we have seen that this Spirit was creatively at work, first of all in letting its forces stream into human evolution in relation to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and again in the mighty act of the Baptism in the Jordan. Thus we now understand what the power of the Holy Spirit is: it is the power which will raise each man ever more and more above all that differentiates and separates him from others, and makes him a member of the whole of humanity on the earth, a power which works as a bond of soul between each and every soul, no matter in what bodies they may be.

It is of this same Holy Spirit that we are now told that at the Whitsun festival it streams, through another revelation, into the individualities of those who first accepted Christianity. In the Baptism by John there stands before us the picture of the Spirit as the dove; now, however, another picture appears, the picture of the fiery tongues. It is in a single dove, a single form, that the Holy Spirit manifests itself in John's Baptism: it is in many single tongues that it manifests itself at the Pentecostal festival. And each of the single tongues brings inspiration to an individual, to each of the individualities of the first disciples of Christianity.

What meaning, then, for our souls, has this Whitsun symbol? After Christ, the bearer of the universal-human Spirit, had completed His work on the earth, after He had suffered the last earthly sheaths of His being to disperse into the universe and His whole sheath-nature had departed as a single entity into the spiritual being of the earth, then, did it first become possible that, in the hearts of those who first understood the Christ Impulse there should arise the power of speaking about the Christ Impulse, of working in the significance of the Christ Impulse. As regards its manifestation in its outer sheaths, the Christ Impulse had vanished at the Ascension into the undivided totality of the spiritual world: ten days later it came forth again out of the hearts of the single individualities of its first followers. And because the same Spirit which had worked in the power of the Christ Impulse now reappeared in multiple forms, the first disciples of Christianity became the bearers and preachers of the Christ message.

Thus at the very beginning of Christian history was set up the powerful sign of this event, which says to us: “Just as the first disciples received each one the Christ Impulse into themselves, just as it was granted to them to receive it in the form of tongues of fire inspiring their own souls, so can you men, all of you, if you bestir yourselves to understand the Christ Impulse, receive its power, individualised, into your own hearts, the power which can develop in you ever more and more, which can become for you ever more and more complete.”—An all-embracing hope can well forth for us out of this sign, which was thus set at the starting-point of Christianity. The more a man perfects himself, the more can he feel that the Holy Spirit speaks out of his own inner being, in the measure that his thinking, feeling and willing are permeated by this Holy Spirit, which through its manifold division is also an individual Spirit in each single human individuality in which it works.

In regard to our future growth therefore, this Holy Spirit is for us men the Spirit of development into free manhood, into the free human soul. The Spirit of freedom holds sway in that Spirit which poured itself out over the first understanders of Christianity in the first Christian Pentecostal festival, the Spirit whose most significant characteristic was indicated by Christ Himself: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!” Man can become free only in the spirit. So long as he is dependent on that bodily nature in which his spirit dwells, so long does he remain its slave. He can become free, only when he finds himself again in spirit, and from out of the spirit becomes lord over that which is in him. “To become free” presupposes the discovery of oneself as a spirit within oneself. The true spirit in which we can make this discovery is the universal human spirit, which we recognise as the Pentecostal power of the Holy Spirit entering into us, and which we must bring to birth in ourselves and allow to come to manifestation.

Thus the Whitsun symbol is transformed for us into the most powerful of our ideals, the free development of the soul of man into a self-enclosed, free individuality. They had some dim feeling of this who, through inspiration, and not, of course, in clear consciousness, had to do with appointing for the Whitsun festival its special day in the year. This outer ordering is in itself remarkable; for whoever cannot detect an all-ruling wisdom even in the fixing of a festival day understands very little of the world. Let us consider from this point of view the three festivals: Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun. As a Christian festival Christmas falls on a particular day in the year; it has been fixed once and for all for a particular day in December, and every year we celebrate Christmas on the selfsame day. It is otherwise with the Easter festival. Easter is a movable feast, which is determined by the constellations in the heavens; it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon which follows the Spring equinox. For this festival we must direct our gaze into the heights of heaven, where the stars go on their way and proclaim to us the laws of the cosmos. Easter is a movable feast, just as in each human individuality that moment is movable in which, in order to become free from the ordinary human lower nature, there awakens the power of the higher man, with a higher consciousness. Just as in one year Easter falls on this day, in another year on that, so with each man, according to his past and the strength of his endeavour, the moment comes sooner or later in which he becomes aware: “I can find the power in myself to let a higher man arise out of me.”

Christmas, however, is an immovable festival. It is the festival where man has left behind him in the course of the year the waxing and waning of nature, the joy of nature's upwelling, streaming forces. Man now beholds nature in a state of sleep, into which she has carried down within herself the force of the seeds. The world of nature has withdrawn herself, with all the birth-forces within her. When to the external world of sense the revelation of these forces is at its lowest; when the earth herself shows how at a given time her spiritual forces withdraw in order to wait for the coming year; when outer nature is at her most silent; then it is, in the Christmas festival, that man must let the thought rise in him that he may hope that he is not only united with the earthly forces, which now at this Christmas time are silent, but also with forces which are present not only on earth but also in spiritual realms. This hope must rise up in his soul because he has seen the earth as it were sink into sleep; it must well up out of the deepest, inmost part of the soul itself, and then it will become spiritual light, when outer physical nature is at its darkest. Through the symbol of the Christmas festival man must thus remind himself that, in the first place, he is just as much bound with his ego-forces to his earth-body, as that which reveals itself around him is bound to the yearly life of the earth. In keeping with the falling asleep of the earth, which takes place at the same time each year, the Christmas festival is also placed at the same time, so that at that time man shall remember that while he is bound to a body, yet he is not condemned to be united only with this, but may hope to find the power to become a free soul within himself. What we see as the meaning of the Christmas festival will thus remind us, both of our connection with the body and also of our hope to free ourselves from this body.

It depends, however, on our own efforts, whether it is earlier or later that we unfold those powers for which we may hope, and which lead us up again into the spiritual, heavenly world. To this thought the Easter festival must bring us. The Easter festival reminds us that we have not only at our disposal those forces which the body gives us, and which are themselves, of course, divine-spiritual forces, but it also reminds us that as men we can raise ourselves above the earth. Hence it is the Easter festival that speaks to us of that force which sooner or later must be brought to its awakening in us. Easter, as a movable festival, is determined according to the constellations in the heavens. So man must waken the recollection of what he can become, by turning his gaze to the sky so as to see how he can be freed from earthly existence, how he can lift himself above all such existence. In the force which comes to us in this way lies the possibility of inner freedom, of inner release. When we feel inwardly that we can raise ourselves above ourselves, we shall then strive to achieve this ascent in all reality; we shall then have the will to make our inner man free, to pull him clear, as it were, from his bondage to the outer man. We shall, of course, be dwelling in the outer man, but we shall be fully conscious of our inner spiritual power, we shall be conscious of the inner man.

Furthermore, it depends upon this moment, at which, in this inner Easter festival, we grow aware that we can free ourselves, whether we also attain to the Whitsun festival, when we may fill the spirit, which has found itself within itself, with a content that is not of this world, but of the spiritual world. This content comes to us out of the spiritual world, and this alone can make us free. It is the spiritual truth of which Christ said: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!” It is for this reason that the Whitsun festival is dependent on the Easter festival, because it is a consequence of the Easter festival. Easter is determined according to the heavenly constellations; Whitsun is an event which must follow it as a necessary result, after the lapse of a certain number of weeks.

Thus, even in the way in which the times for these festivals are determined, we see, on deeper reflection, an all-ruling wisdom; we see that these festivals are of necessity placed just where they are in the course of the year, and that each year they bring before us what, as men, we have been and are—and what we can become. When we know how to think of these festivals in this way, then they become for us festivals which unite us with all that is past, and they become an impulse implanted in humanity to carry it forward into the future.

The Whitsun festival in particular, when we understand it in this way, bestows confidence, strength and hope, when we know what we can become in our souls through following those who, as the first to understand the Christ Impulse, made themselves worthy to have the fiery tongues descend upon them. When we understand the Whitsun festival as a festival, not only of that moment, but of the future as well, then there is magically brought before our spiritual eyes the expectancy of receiving the Holy Spirit. But then we must learn to understand this Whitsun festival in its truly Christian sense. We must learn to understand first of all what the mighty tongues, the mighty Whitsun inspiration, said. What was it which sounded forth with trumpet-tones from the ‘rushing mighty wind,’ of which we are told in that picture which is placed before our souls as the Whitsun picture of the first Christian Pentecostal festival? What kind of voices were these which proclaimed in the wondrous music of the spheres: “You have experienced the power of the Christ Impulse, you who are the first to understand. And the power of the Christ in you has become a power of your own souls, in such a way that each one of you, now that the Event of Golgotha has been accomplished, has become able to see the Christ now, in this present time. With such strength has the Christ Impulse worked upon each one of you!”

The Christ Impulse, however, is an impulse of freedom; its true activity does not reveal itself when it takes place outside the human soul. The true working of the Christ Impulse does not appear until it takes place within the individual human soul itself. So it was that those who first understood the Christ felt themselves called through the Whitsun event to proclaim what was in their own souls, what, in the revelation and inspiration of their own souls revealed itself to them as the content of the Christ-teaching. In that they were aware that the Christ Impulse had worked in that holy preparation which they had undergone before the Whitsun festival, they felt themselves called, through the power of the Christ Impulse working within them, to let speak the fiery tongues, the individualised Holy Spirit within them, and to go forth and proclaim the Gospel of Christ. It was not simply what Christ had once said to them that those first disciples recognised as words of Christ, not only those words He had already spoken. They recognised as Christ-words that which comes out of the power of a soul which feels the Christ Impulse within itself. [Cp. I Cor. VII, 25 and 40.]

To this end did the Holy Spirit pour itself in individualised form into each single human soul, so that each one might develop the power, in itself, to feel the Christ Impulse. Then for such a soul the word becomes new: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Those, therefore, who are earnestly at pains to experience the Christ Impulse may also feel called on, by what the Christ Impulse arouses in their hearts, to proclaim afresh the word of Christ, even though it may sound forth ever new, ever different in each epoch of mankind. It was not that we might cling to the few words of the Gospels spoken in the first decade of Christianity's foundation, that the Holy Spirit was poured down on men: it was poured forth so that for ever the Gospel of Christ may relate new things and again things ever new. As the souls of men progress from epoch to epoch, from incarnation to incarnation, new things must always be spoken for these human souls. Should these souls, advancing from incarnation to incarnation, be told to accept as the proclamation of Christ only the words which were spoken when they were incarnated in bodies contemporary with the temporal appearance of Christ on the earth? Within the Christ Impulse dwells the power to speak to all men, until the end of the time-cycle of the earth. That this may be, however, there must be added that which makes it possible for the message of Christ to be made known in each age to the ever advancing souls of men, in a way appropriate to them. So when we feel the full strength and power of the Whitsun impulse, we should feel that it is laid on us to listen to the word: “I am with you always, even to the end of the earth's cycle of time!” And when you fill yourselves with the Christ Impulse you can hear continually through all the ages the Word, stirred into life at the founding of Christianity by the Founder Himself, the Word that Christ speaks in every age because He is with men in every age, the Word which all can hear who have the will to hear it.

Thus we understand the power of the Whitsun impulse as that which gives us the right to regard Christianity as something which is ever growing, always bestowing on us new and again ever new revelations. We know that in the Spiritual Science of to-day we are proclaiming the Christ-Word itself, ringing through to us from out of the heavenly choirs, and we say to those who would preserve Christianity only in its original form: “We are those who understand the Christ in truth, for we understand the real meaning of the Whitsun festival!”

Whenever we feel ourselves thus called to bring forth ever new wisdom-teaching out of Christianity, we must bring forth just that wisdom which is fitting for men's souls at that stage of their progressive development from incarnation to incarnation. Christianity is endlessly full, endlessly rich; but this endless fullness and richness was not always available to man in the centuries in which Christianity had first to be proclaimed. What presumption it would be to say, even at the present time, that mankind is now mature enough to understand Christianity in its infinite fullness and its infinite greatness! That alone is true Christian humility which says: The scope of Christian wisdom is without end, but the receptivity of man for this wisdom was at first limited; it will become ever more and more complete.

Let us look at the first Christian centuries, right up to our own day. A great and mighty impulse, the greatest ever given in the earthly evolution of man, was given with the Christ Impulse. This is something of which everyone can become conscious who learns to understand the process of the evolution of the earth. But one thing must not be forgotten: only a small part of what the Christ Impulse contains has been understood up till now. For the past, close on two millennia of Christian development, what was given in esoteric Christianity could be a teaching only for those to whom Christianity was brought, and could not be embodied in outer, exoteric life.

For example, there could not be embodied what can be taught in our present epoch as a Christian truth, namely, the fact of the re-embodiment of mankind, or reincarnation. When we, in Anthroposophy, teach reincarnation to-day, we are fully conscious, in the light of the Whitsun festival, that reincarnation is a Christian truth which can be made known exoterically to-day to a humanity which has become more mature, but which could not be made known to the immature souls of the first Christian centuries. Little is done by attempting to show, by citing single instances, that the thought of reincarnation is also to be found in Christianity. One can discover from those opponents of Spiritual Science who call themselves Christian, how little is known in exoteric Christianity of reincarnation. The only thing they know is that Spiritual Science teaches something or other about reincarnation, and that is enough for them to say it is Indian or Buddhistic. They little know that it is the living Christ, from out of the spiritual world, who is the living teacher of reincarnation to-day. People regard reincarnation, as also the doctrine of karma, as things which up till now have not been able to penetrate into exoteric Christianity. But it is little by little, in one age after another, that the fullness of truth which lies in Christianity has had to be given to mankind. With the Christ Impulse itself, which is not a teaching or a theory, but a real force that has to be experienced in the innermost depths of the soul, with this Impulse itself something is actually imparted to us. What is this? It is just when we bring the Christ Impulse into connection with the teaching of reincarnation that we can understand what is given in it.

We know that a few centuries before Christianity began, another teaching, a formal teaching, was given, for the most part in Eastern lands, namely, the teaching of the Buddha. While the power and the impulse of Christianity were spreading from the Near East into the West, the Far East witnessed a widespread expansion of Buddhism. Of this teaching we know that it contained the doctrine of reincarnation. But in what form? For those who know the facts, Buddhism presents itself as the final product of the teachings and revelations which had preceded it. Accordingly it contained in itself all the greatness of antiquity; it put forward something like a final conclusion of the primeval wisdom of mankind in which was contained the doctrine of reincarnation.

But how did Buddhism clothe this doctrine in its revelations? In such a way that man looks back at the incarnations which he has passed through, and forward to the incarnations which he has still to experience. That man passes through many incarnations is an entirely exoteric teaching in Buddhism. It is quite wrong to speak of an abstract similarity between all religions. In actual truth, mighty and far-reaching differences exist between them, as, for example, between Christianity, which for centuries harboured no thoughts of reincarnation, and exoteric Buddhism, which lived and moved in such thoughts. In this connection it is entirely useless to put together mere abstractions; rather must one recognise the world of reality. It is an utter certainty for Buddhism that man always returns to the earth; the Buddhist, however, looks on this in the following way. He says: “Combat the urge to descend into these incarnations, for thy real task is, as quickly as possible, to free thyself from the thirst to go through them, so as to live in freedom from all earthly incarnation in a spiritual realm!” It is thus that the Buddhist regards the sequence of human incarnations, striving to acquire all the forces he can in order to withdraw from these incarnations as soon as possible. One thing Buddhism has not got—and this is plain in its exoteric teaching. It does not contain anything that can be called an impulse strong enough to grow ever more towards human perfection. That would enable the Buddhist to say: “By all means, let the incarnations come! Through the Christ Impulse we can so shape ourselves that we can extract ever more and more from them. Through the Christ Impulse we possess a force which can give these incarnations an ever loftier content. Permeate Buddhism—or what is found in it of the true doctrine of reincarnation—with the Christ Impulse, and you have a new element which gives the earth a new meaning in the evolution of mankind!”

On the other hand, Christianity has the Christ Impulse, and that as something exoteric. But how has it regarded this Impulse in earlier centuries? Undoubtedly the exoteric Christian sees in it something infinitely perfect, that should live in himself as the great ideal which he himself approaches ever more and more. But how presumptuous it would be for the Christian to think that in a single earthly life he could have enough power to bring to fulfilment the seed which can be kindled into life through the Christ Impulse! How presumptuous it would be for the exoteric Christian to believe that in one life he would be in the position to achieve anything adequate for the unfolding of the Christ Impulse. Accordingly the exoteric Christian says: “We go through the gates of death. Then in the spiritual world we shall have the opportunity to develop further and to unfold the Christ Impulse further in that world.”—And so the exoteric Christian conceives of a spiritual life after death from which there is no return to the earth.

Does, however, an exoteric Christian who believes that an existence in a spiritual world is thus added to the life on earth, understand the Christ Impulse? He does not understand it in the least. For if he did, he would never believe that what the Christ Impulse has to give him can be achieved in a spiritual life beyond death, without any return to the earth. In order that the Deed on Golgotha could take place, in order that this victory over death could be achieved, the Christ Himself had to descend into this life on earth; and this indeed He had to do in order to accomplish something which can be experienced and lived through only on our earth. The Christ came down to earth because the power of the Deed of Golgotha had to work upon men in the physical body.¹ Hence also the Christ-power can work at first only on men in the physical body. What man has received of the power of the Mystery of Golgotha in the physical body, this can then work further, when he goes through the gate of death. But only as much of the Christ Impulse as man has taken into himself in the life between birth and death works on. Man must strive on to the further completion of that which he has already received, when he comes again to the earth, and only in his successive earthly lives to come can he learn to understand all that lives in the Christ Impulse. Never could man understand the Christ Impulse, if he lived only once on the earth. This Impulse, therefore, must lead us through repeated earth-lives, because the earth is the place for the discovery of the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so Christianity is only complete when one replaces the assumption that one could live out the Christ Impulse in one incarnation, by the other thought, that only through repeated earthly lives can man so perfect himself that he may live out in himself the Christ Ideal. What he has experienced on earth in connection with it he can then bring up into the spiritual world. But he can only bring as much as he has grasped on the earth of that Impulse, which itself had to be fulfilled on the earth, as the most important event of all earthly happenings. Thus we see that the thought which must next be added to Christianity out of spiritual revelation is the thought of reincarnation, born from out of Christianity itself. When we understand this we shall see what it signifies for us to-day, in the sphere of Spiritual Science, to be conscious that we fashion ourselves out of the Whitsun revelation. It signifies for us that we are right in listening to the revelation, in seeing a renewal of the revelation of that power which was in the “fiery tongues,” which descended upon those who first understood the Christ.

In this way, a great deal of what has been said recently in our Movement can come before us to-day with new meaning. We see the fusion of East and West, of the two mighty revelations of Christianity and Buddhism; we see them flow together in the spiritual. And through the right understanding of the Christian Whitsun thought we can justify the flowing together of these two greatest religions of the earth to-day. But it is not through merely external impulses that we can unite these two revelations; that would be to stop at mere theorising. Anyone trying to take what Christianity and Buddhism have provided up till now and to weld them together into a new religion would not create a new spiritual content for mankind, but only an abstract theory, incapable of warming a single human soul. If this is to happen, new revelations are necessary. And that, for us, is what resounds to-day as the proclamation of spirit-knowledge—audible, it is true, only to such as have matured themselves in spiritual-scientific schooling: “Let the Christ, who is always with us, speak in us.”

We know that we live in an important time of human evolution: that already before the close of this century new forces will develop in the human soul which will lead man to the unfolding of a kind of etheric clairvoyance, whereby, as if through a natural development, there will be renewed for certain human beings the event which Paul experienced at Damascus; and that in this way, for the heightened spiritual powers of man, Christ will return in an etheric garb. Ever more and more souls will share in what Paul experienced at Damascus. Then it will be seen in the world that Spiritual Science is the revelation, heralding a renewed and transformed truth of the Christ Impulse. Only those will understand the new revelation who believe that the fresh stream of the spiritual life into which Christ poured Himself will remain living for all ages to come. Whoever will not believe that, may preach a Christianity which has grown old. But whoever believes in the Whitsun event and understands it, will also bring to mind that what began with the Christian evangel will develop ever farther and farther and will speak to men in ever new tones; that there will always be present the individualised soul-worlds of the Holy Spirit, the fiery tongues, and that in ever-renewed fire and impulse the human soul will be able to live with and live out of the Christ Impulse.

We can believe in the future of Christianity when in very truth we understand the Whitsun thought. And then there comes before us the mighty picture, with a force that works like a force present in the soul itself. Then do we feel the future, as the first understanders felt it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, if only we are willing to make alive in our souls that which knows nothing of the boundaries separating the different parts of humanity and speaks a language which all souls, all the world over, can understand. We feel the thought of peace, of love, of harmony, which lies in the Whitsun thought. And we feel this Whitsun thought enlivening our Whitsun festival. We feel it to be a surety for our hope of freedom and eternity. Because we feel the individualised spirit awakening in our souls, there awakens in us the most significant element of the spirit: the endlessness of the spiritual. Through sharing in the spiritual, man can become conscious of his immortality and his eternity. And in the Whitsun thought we truly realise the power of those primal words which Initiate after Initiate continued to implant, and which reveal to us the meaning of wisdom and eternity: we feel them as a Whitsun thought, handed on from epoch to epoch, in the words which to-day for the first time sound forth exoterically:

Being is ranged by Being in the widths of Space,
Being follows on Being in the courses of Time,
Remain'st thou in widths of Space, in courses of Time,
Then art thou, 0 man, in the passing world alone.
But above them with power thy soul itself upraises
When, divining or knowing, it beholds what passes not;
Beyond the widths of Space, beyond the courses of Time!

Wesen reiht sich an Wesen in den Raumesweiten,
Wesen folgt auf Wesen in den Zeitenläufen.
Verbleibst du in Raumesweiten und Zeitenläufen,
Bist du, 0 Mensch, allein in Gebiete der Vergänglichkeit.
Über sie aber erhebt deine Seele sich gewaltiglich,
Wenn sie erahnend oder wissend schaut das Unvergängliche
Jenseits der Raumesweiten und jenseits der Zeitenläufe!

• 1. i.e. in and through physical consciousness.

Speaking about the problem of immortality and about the riddle of freedom spiritual-scientifically is the task of the whole cycle that I would like to hold in this winter here. These are the two questions that admittedly the scientific worldview cannot approach and in which the only philosophical world consideration will always smash as it arises from my book The Riddles of Philosophy and from an unbiased consideration of the historical development of philosophy.

I would like today to consider a partial question possibly in a concluded whole: the question of the human being as a being of soul and spirit. Already while pronouncing these words, one touches, actually, the question of the human soul in a way that is very far from the present worldview. The present worldview—if it generally gets involved to look at something else than that which experimental psychology, biology, physiology give—speaks of a duality of body and soul. I would like to show that this arrangement of the human being must lead to serious misunderstandings that divert a scientific consideration, actually, from the highest human riddles. One believes today that in the so-called soul riddles the riddle of spirit is already enclosed, and you will find, while you dedicate yourself to this misunderstanding, the applause of some scientific world viewers and also of some soul viewers. Spiritual science generally is in a peculiar relation to the scientific and to the philosophical worldviews.

You know that I have stressed repeatedly that spiritual science stands everywhere completely on the ground of scientific research, and just because it stands more than the scientific worldview on scientific ground, it feels forced to ascend from the mere consideration of nature and her life to the consideration of the real spiritual life. Only the scientific worldview that became ingrained in a big part of our contemporaries also behaves in their choicest representatives in such a way that spiritual science has a rough ride to find understanding anyhow. I would like to say some introductory words about it because they will be necessary in case of our further consideration.

Today one can find that in certain areas the scientific worldview has almost got to a kind of ideal limitation of its field. We have works in the scientific realm that you can regard as exemplary in the way, how they restrict their task with the realisation of single problems. After the unilaterally Darwinian-Haeckel romanticism of the last third of the nineteenth century biology, for example, has advanced so far that we have such an exemplary work as the work of the Berlin researcher Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922) about The Origin of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). We also have ingenious achievements for such areas, which touch the borders of that what should be regarded here methodically, as for example the Guide to Physiological Psychology (1891) by Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950, German neurologist, psychiatrist). One may say that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science espouses such methodical research where it depends on the consideration of the actually scientific area. I myself always oppose with all that I would like to contribute to spiritual science the sometimes indeed well intentioned, but dilettantish worldview constructions that arise from some inadequate attempts of knowledge.

However, just this methodical scientific worldview gives spiritual science a hard fight to find understanding with our contemporaries. Even in the so exemplary book by Oscar Hertwig we find as it were the scientific conviction that natural sciences can deal only with the finite and cannot consider the infinite. However, natural sciences can explore the finite in all directions. Hertwig repeats Nägeli's (Karl Wilhelm N., 1817-1891, Swiss botanist) words from his scientific point of view rightly, and Theodor Ziehen also says that he wants to look at everything in the human soul life that has parallel phenomena in the human body, so that physiology can give information about these parallel phenomena. One must leave everything else to metaphysics or the like. Then, however, Ziehen says again that that is more important which the present physiological-psychological research puts forward in its details, which are, actually, nothing special which do not say anything particular about the big riddles of soul and spirit, than everything that was tried to perform about the supersensible in the soul life and the like for centuries. If we add the dictum which already before decades the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond (Emil Du B.R., 1818-1896) did that real science is only allowed to deal, actually, with the sensory world because science stops where the supersensible begins, we find that by which the scientific worldview wants to pull the rug out under the feet of any spiritual science. On one side one always says rather benevolently: one has to leave all questions which exceed the sensory consideration to metaphysics or something similar, nevertheless, on the other side one argues again that real science can be performed only in the area of sensory consideration.

Thus, we realise that science blanks out everything mental and spiritual, and it solely claims the character of scientificity for that which is left. Compared with such attempts I would like to stress that spiritual science stands even in the question of the so-called old vitality absolutely on the ground of such researchers like Du Bois-Reymond, Hertwig and others. Since this vitality which haunted in science until the middle, until the end of the second third of the nineteenth century is a product of speculation.

Because one believed that the phenomena in the living organism were not explicable with physical and chemical laws, one speculated on an uncertain vitality to which one ascribed everything that one could not explain chemically or physically. Du Bois-Reymond said in his excellent preface of his Researches on Animal Electricity (1848-1864) already at the middle of the nineteenth century with a certain right that the progress of physiology necessitated, actually, that once somebody would come who banishes this vitality from physiology. Spiritual science can agree even with such a hard condemnation of vitality. Since it can figure everything out that is brought forward from physiological-biological side rightly against such a hypothetical, speculative vitality, and can consider what appears today again as so-called neovitalism only as a reaction which is caused by the fact that one realises sporadically: we cannot already recognise that what lives simply as the only physical and chemical. However, this reaction returns more or less to the old speculation of an uncertain vitality.

Spiritual science represented here can also not agree with this reaction against the purely mechanistic natural sciences. For it, however, it must arrogate something else to itself. With those cognitive forces and abilities which lead just to the big, significant scientific results one cannot exceed the only physical and chemical. Of course, the living beings are subject to physical and chemical laws because they have physical bodies. These must be investigated with physics and chemistry, and one is not allowed to contrive any vitality. But the mere cognitive forces and abilities as natural sciences apply them rightly are not sufficient to understand life, soul and spirit, and one only has the option either to stop in the area of physical and chemical laws and then to renounce understanding life, soul and spirit, or to appeal to quite different cognitive forces.

With it, however, you are confronted again with a widespread prejudice. Most people do not believe that the human soul striving methodically gets to cognitive forces and abilities that are quite different from those of natural sciences. So you face a double possibility only not to comprehend soul and spirit or to cross the Rubicon to familiarise yourself with the advancement of the human souls. It can thereby get to such cognitive forces that are more important to you than that what natural sciences can say, just if they are perfect. You are confronted with a severe prejudice. You must say from the viewpoint of spiritual science, natural sciences behave, actually, to spiritual science in such a way as somebody who can only describe the letters that are printed on any page behaves to that who can read them. Spiritual science tries to read that which natural sciences can only describe. That what it has to say about the phenomena of the world, about its contents and about the significance of the processes behaves like something read to the description of the letters that compose the words. There is the possibility to penetrate really into life, soul, and spirit, while one attains an ability of reading nature. This ability behaves compared with the mere physical consideration like the free ability of reading to the mere description of letters.

Now many contemporaries if such a thing is said remember of course that this is a reference to all kinds of fantastic visionary activities of the soul. However, that does not at all apply. Spiritual science is rather something for which one has to work hard and methodically, as natural sciences have to do it. But spiritual science has a rough ride today to penetrate because since centuries already any human worldview has intended to blank out the spiritual from the soul more or less, to consider the soul as the whole inwardness of the human being, and to think it more or less dependent or also independent of the body, but to search no such relation of the soul to the spirit as it is searched on the other side by the soul to the body. Someone who only with pure soul experiences—even if these would be mystically increased soul experiences—wants to find out something about the real nature of the human being as a spiritual being resembles someone who wants to inform himself because of hunger and thirst of those processes which take place in the human body, and which are the basis of that which the soul experiences as hunger and thirst.

Everybody easily realises that hunger and thirst are the inner experience of something that happens in the body. The scientific worldview says, if the human being feels hunger and thirst, a chemical change has taken place in the blood or as the case may be. It points to the fact that in the body something has happened that expresses itself as the experience of thirst and hunger in the soul. However, one has to look at the soul experiences, if one wants to investigate what goes forward in the body. Of course, you cannot investigate in a living being that has no hunger how the hunger expresses itself bodily, but you can never find out for yourself that you only consider the inner experience of hunger or saturation with which bodily processes this inner experience is associated. Just as little you can get to know something from this mere play about that which forms the basis of the soul as something spiritual, even if you immerse yourself ever so mystically. As well as natural sciences must proceed from the experience of hunger and thirst with their methods to something that is not observed in the usual soul life—for the human being knows nothing of the chemical process in his body, while he suffers from hunger and thirst—, you have to change into something spiritual if you consider everything that can be experienced by imagining, feeling and willing in the soul.

However, how can you find this spiritual being? The sensory places itself before the senses, while the human being faces nature; the spiritual does not do it in the same way. The spiritual confronts the human being only if he rouses the cognitive abilities from his inside that I have called “beholding” in my book The Riddle of Man that slumbers in the usual life as it were. Now I would like to talk not about something abstract, but I would like to show immediately at a concrete example that—as the naturalist can go over by his method from the subjective hunger and thirst to the bodily processes which are unconscious in the usual experience—it is as possible to go over from the soul phenomena to the spiritual phenomena which relate from one side to the soul as from the other side the soul relates to the body. Already with such concrete questions you are confronted straight away with opposition of the common consideration of the soul life. This wants to consider, actually, the passive soul life only because it takes the scientific methods as starting point. You cannot consider the active soul life scientifically that is active in its being from within, and it is often lost generally out of sight. Today natural sciences often consider the mental experience only how mental pictures form a group, how a mental picture is maybe caused by outer perception, how it causes another which is stored in memory, or also many other. One observes how the mental pictures associate with gradations of feeling, with will impulses or the like. One does not attain methods that you can compare concerning the spiritual with the strict methods of the scientific worldview. If you take the Physiological Psychology by Theodor Ziehen, you realise how everything results in the fact that our whole soul life is built up on such associations if it exceeds the mere sensory life. However, this kind of consideration just does not get to the impartial beholding of the soul life.

Such consideration, for example, shows the following: you can realise if you get to a real observation or introspection of the soul, as I will show it after, that we are dependent in the usual life with our soul experience on that what life gives us as mental pictures. If the human being lets his soul life to its own resources, the mental pictures play in it that have come from the impressions of the outside world into his soul. He is a kind of slave of his mental pictures in a way. Theodor Ziehen says with a certain right, we cannot think as we want, but we must think as the just available associations determine it because this or that impression has been done on us that causes another impression. Thus we are given away—after Ziehen—to the play of impressions. We are not so free in the usual life in relation to our imagining as we mean. However, we are also not as dependent as Theodor Ziehen means. Someone who can advance to the soul observation knows that, indeed, the strong dependence on impressions is there, but it lasts for a certain time. This is something to which modern psychology does not give thought at all. However, a mental picture that is caused by an impression tyrannises us. If I have seen a friend, this mental picture pursues me, it causes other mental pictures of other friends, of common experiences with these friends and so on, and you are dependent on these mental pictures, but only for some time. This time can be determined even internally experimentally. This time takes two to three days. However, after this time the power changes with which such an impression works on our soul. Then we can emotionally relate to an impression in such a way as the impression has related to us before.

We were its slaves before; we become its masters after two to three days. You can do this, for example, in the following way. If you have a feeling for the inner soul life, you can ask yourself, which difference exists between being given to the inner soul life, as it takes place by itself for some time, and reading a book? If I read a book, I cannot be carried from one mental picture to another. I would not advance reading if I were carried by mental pictures that an impression has caused in me, I must dedicate myself rather to that what flows from the book as mental pictures. There I come under the control of the author. The author controls the course of my mental pictures. I become similar with my ego to that what happens if my mental pictures are controlled by the mental pictures that come from the book if I have lived with any impression for two to three days, concerning this impression. Then I leave myself not to the association that this impression wants to cause, but I have the inner power to associate this impression with others. An entire change of an image impression proceeds in the human soul if it has lasted for two to three days in the soul.

You can already convince yourself of the truth of the just said without being a spiritual researcher by usual, more intimate observation of the soul life, indeed, in an area that is considered only cursorily nowadays, and that the so-called analytic psychology or psychoanalysis despises. However, I do not want to go into that. However, I would like to point out that someone who can really observe dreams knows that the involuntary appearance of dreams is always associated anyhow with the impressions of the last days, actually, only of the last two to three days. However, do not misunderstand me! Of course, bygone events appear in the dreams as memories.

However, it is something else that evokes these bygone events. If you can observe the dream exactly, you always realise that any mental picture of the last two to three days must be there. That only evokes bygone events. For two to three days, the impressions of the outside world have the power to generate dreams. Then the other things are associated with them. Unless such mental picture can generate the dream, it cannot originate. However, you have really to observe what I have indicated now, because the usual consciousness cannot observe it. This is just so unknown to many people today because it proceeds in the unconscious. As a rule, the human being attains no knowledge how he relates different to a mental picture that is not yet present for two to three days in his soul, and to such which is present already so long. One can observe all these things exactly and properly only as a spiritual researcher. However, he needs a certain strengthening of the usual soul life to the real observation. The imagining applies for the usual soul life, actually, only to that which it repeats and develops in a way what the senses perceive from the outside. This soul life can now be strengthened, so that these pale, uncertain mental pictures of the everyday life can appear in another way in the soul so that its power matches a sense perception. However, this must happen if you want to do researches really in the spiritual area. With the usual cognitive forces, you cannot do these researches. I have described the method in detail in my books How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and Occult Science by which you can lift up imagining and by which you change it into Imagination, into the beholding percipience.

I would like only to emphasise some things of the big wealth of that which the soul has to carry out with itself to strengthen its life. I want to refer to that what I have recently emphasised in my last book The Riddles of the Soul, the continuation of my book The Riddle of Man: the fact that the human being if he activates his usual soul life in science gets to certain so-called limits of knowledge. These limits of knowledge can face you if you familiarise yourself with the worldviews of profound thinkers. If I may bring in something personal here: experiences have led me to this form of spiritual science thirty to 35 years ago which I could gain in the worldviews of such persons to whom knowledge is not an external occupation, but something that constitutes the core of their longing and feeling. If you are confronted, for example, with the thinker Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887) with words which have come to him when he had thought about the connection of body and soul, with words like: the soul cannot be in the body, but it can also not be beyond the body, then you get in living connection with an original, elementary thinker to such limits in which the human soul life must come if it wants to be cognitively active.

The usual thinking just puts limits of knowledge in such points of the soul life. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of “seven world riddles” which cannot be solved; however, one could bring in hundreds of such so-called limits of the human soul life:

• if you do not content yourself with such limits, but if you try to go through everything that the soul has to go through while it says to itself, you have to put questions which the natural outside world cannot answer, also that what comes up from your soul cannot answer them,

• if you combine in your innermost soul life with these questions,

• if you have patience to struggle with them not only logically, but internally,

• if you put them repeatedly to your soul not only to get to know what they say logically, but what they release vividly in the soul,

then something emerges from such questions gradually in the soul. One experiences something emotionally that I want to bring to mind in the following way by a comparison. Just the scientific worldview often thinks that the lowest living beings only have an inner life activity at first, develop it in contact with the outside world and thereby transform their still undifferentiated organisms, so that it touches the outside world not only in an uncertain way, but that this touching is differentiated to the sense of touch, and from the sense of touch the other senses should have gradually developed phylogenetically. That which the being experiences in living matter can be really compared with that which the soul experiences if it is confronted with such limits. If you get to know the mental experience of such limits really, you feel that with it nothing is meant that deals with the origin of outer sensory tools. If you have patience to settle down in such riddles, a sort of mental groping develops, then something arises from it like a differentiation of the soul life. Today most people do not believe in that, of course. However, one will believe in it more and more if one realises that only in such a way one can attain real knowledge of the phenomena of the world and in particular of the riddle of the human being. The human being gradually does not only reach questions of limits, but he develops his soul with it, and thus those higher organs of beholding originate by which the soul learns gradually to penetrate into the spirit. This is only one of those exercises that the soul has to practise to transform the undifferentiated soul life, so that it can really penetrate into the spiritual world.

I would have to bring in a lot of that what you can read in the mentioned books if I wanted to explain how imagining becomes something else than in the usual life. Imagining is something passive that follows the sensory percepts. Because the soul life is invigorated by many exercises, it becomes something else from imagining. The imagining becomes active so that as it were an ego asserts itself which is much more concrete than the usual one, and the human being gets to know that he can really observe the soul phenomena with such increased soul life.

If I now return, after I have developed the nature of real self-knowledge, to that what I have asserted up to now, I have to say, what happens there, actually, while the mental pictures change from that state which they have for two to three days into the other state which they have later, one can figure this out only with such reinforced soul life. Since you get to know then that the human being becomes as free compared with the mental pictures that subjectively prevail for two to three days, after this time, as he is usually free from his usual body. The human being gets to know what he is in his inside what controls the mental pictures in such a way, as we control the hands and legs if we grasp or go with our usual ego. The human being gets to know the higher ego that remains usually unconscious and moves within the mindscape as the usual ego moves in the bodily life. That means we come after two to three days from that which is subjective to the objective of the soul life.

We enter that which outer impressions do not control, and which we learn to recognise as that which carries the outer impressions through the whole life between birth and death. We learn to recognise something second in the human being to which we feel as we feel towards our body in the usual life. We get to know what I have called in one of the last numbers of the magazine Das Reich (The Empire) the body of formative forces, a supersensible body that is there, as well as the usual physical body is there. However, it remains unconscious for the usual soul life. As well as the hand of the physical body is moved by the usual ego, the human being learns to recognise how he works within that which carries the imagination which lives in the imagination and this is only the spirit. The spirit is not the imagination, but what lives in the imagination in such a way as the usual soul lives in the body. However, while the usual psychology considers, actually, the whole soul life only as it prevails for two to three days, calculated from the impressions, it does not get at all from the soul to the spirit, blanks out the spirit. For the usual soul life, it is blanked out in a way.

A self-consideration shows this of which we can speak now, after I have already indicated what its being consists of. You all are clear in your mind that the ego stands in the centre of the soul life. However, today the psychologist is less clear about that in his mind. It is interesting what, for example, such an excellent psychologist like Theodor Ziehen says in his book Physiological Psychology just about the ego. This book contains printed lectures. There he says to his listeners, if you think about that which the ego is, actually, where to do you come there, actually? If you really think about it, at first your body will come into your mind, then everything that you have as relations to the outside world; then everything that you have as relatives and possession, your name and title, your dominating mental pictures and your main inclinations, your past will come into your mind. Indeed, Theodor Ziehen says, the reflective consciousness distinguishes now—except everything that comes into your mind in such a way—the ego as that which prevails inside, which moves and works from the inside imagining. Nevertheless, it is a fiction of epistemology or of speculative psychology. Physiological psychology has nothing to do with that.

This is such a place again by which the ground should be pulled away under the feet of spiritual science. However, can anybody really allow himself for the usual consciousness to think with his ego only of everything that Theodor Ziehen thinks? Does he not feel the inner activity of a central being in his soul life? Does he only think really of his relatives and properties, of his title and name and the like? No, there can be no talk of it! The human being is aware that in his inside something prevails. Still he comes, actually, to nothing if he characterises the ego. The scientific psychology is right in a limited sense if it cannot say much about this ego. How does this ego behave in the usual consciousness? An introspection shows this again.

If this ego becomes something else by the exercises that I have described, then one also notices what the ego is, considered with the usual consciousness. One distinguishes two states in the human life after the outer appearance: sleeping and waking, and thinks, they alternate between day and night. One does not know that for a real consideration of the soul something else arises. We sleep not only at night, but a part of our being also sleeps by day, sleeps perpetually. The invigoration of the ego is in a certain sense a real arousal of the ego that sleeps perpetually. We know nothing about the contents of our sleep; we know only that it interrupts our usual life. If we survey our life from birth to death, we look back, actually, always only at the daily experiences, the night experiences are nothing. If we look at our life in such a way, then is that which we are in sleep as if it were not there. It is excluded from our field of observation. However, that applies also to the ego in the usual soul life. It is not there strictly speaking for the imagining and other consideration; the real ego escapes from the usual soul life because the human being sleeps concerning his ego in his present stage of development also by day.

We know only negatively about our ego, we know about it in such a way as the eye looks with the blind spot that it has inwardly. We know that there is nothing. We know also about the ego as about a black spot on a coloured surface. Although no colour phenomena come from there, we see a black place. Thus, we see that nothing is surrounded by our usual experiences, and thus we have the consciousness of the sleeping ego. It is aroused because the soul forces are increased in such a way as I have described it. Thus, only the real essence appears in the human being gradually. You learn to recognise the connections of the soul life with the spirit, as well as you learn to recognise from natural sciences if we have hunger and thirst that a body is there in which chemical transformations of the blood take place which express themselves in the soul life as hunger and thirst. As there a body is connected with the soul life by certain processes about which the human being knows nothing at first in the usual life, you learn to recognise on the other side that the soul is connected with the spirit. While the body is recognised from without, the spirit is recognised, while you become aware of the sleeping ego.

As well as the ego is crowded together in one point, the human being as a spiritual being is recognised by the usual consciousness. If you strengthen the inner soul force, you realise that this ego really gets contents as you attain the contents of the bodily for the only inner sensations by methodical scientific research. You get to a real investigation of the spirit as you get to know the chemical transformations which take place in the blood or, otherwise, in the body if the human being has hunger or thirst or feels saturation.

Thus, you learn to recognise how a mental picture that lives in you and is a mere mental picture at first is fulfilled with pictorial contents that are not as abstract as the mental picture of the usual consciousness. The spiritual researcher lifts these contents up in the consciousness so that the mental picture becomes like a perception of these pictorial, Imaginative contents. The spiritual researcher beholds Imaginative processes that change. If, for example, a mental picture becomes warmer what proceeds for the usual consciousness in the subconscious, then something else originates from the mental picture. Then something originates from it that is not only a cognitive or perceptual image, but also an image motivating the will.

This is a very significant progress for the spiritual researcher, if he can ascend to such a knowledge by which he realises how the cognitive image changes into a will image because its Imaginative contents change which pass then to that what becomes or can become active in us. There you realise that the spiritual stands behind the mental and is perpetually changing. As we can describe chemical and physical processes in the body, we can describe spiritually how behind imagining, feeling, and will impulses changes are which go from the Imaginative to the Inspirative and to the Intuitive. As from the chemical transformation of the body subjectively hunger and thirst appear, the spiritual appears vice versa subjective, either as a perceptual image or also as an image of feeling which changes then into an image of will. Thus, you become able to describe that which lives behind the soul as a spiritual being as the bodily lives behind the soul towards the other side. Then you recognise that this becomes really concrete in the human being what can appear before the strengthened soul life so that we feel that which I have called “body of formative forces,” as we feel the physical body usually only. Then you also get to know that which lives outdoors in the world beyond the sensory as something supersensible in quite concrete way.

Sometimes I anticipate something in a former talk that I explain more exactly in later talks. Thus, it is also with the following. However, today I already want to point to it. The plant is composed not only of that which physics and chemistry, or biology or physiology can investigate but it contains something else. If we have brought ourselves to the point where we feel the body of formative forces in ourselves as we feel usually in the physical body, we can perceive the supersensible in the remaining world with this body of formative forces. Then we behold the spiritual in any plant, in any animal and in the physical human that is then not anything visionary in trivial sense, but also is there before the strengthened soul like the contents of sensory perception before the not strengthened soul. However, we have to replace the spatial concepts with temporal ones everywhere. In what way do we perceive, actually, the supersensible in the plant? By perceiving our own supersensible in the body of formative forces as if a tone perceives the other in a melody.

The perception of the supersensible in the plant realm is completely based on the fact that the life of our body of formative forces proceeds much slower than the life of the plant body of formative forces. I have more exactly explained this in a small writing The Human Life from the Viewpoint of Spiritual Science (1916, now in Philosophy and Anthroposophy, GA 35). There you will find how everything depends on these different speeds. Because our body of formative forces can interact like a higher, malleable organ with the much faster proceeding life of the plant, we really perceive the other kind of the life in the plants. Thereby something else will face our soul than the old, speculative vitality. We perceive, to put it another way, something supersensible in the sensory.

It is hard to speak impartially of these things already today. Only if one feels obliged in certain sense to the knowledge of truth, one does this. Since many people mean of course that such things are not based on scientific spirit, but on speculative fiction or daydreaming. Only slowly and gradually, humanity will learn that this is no daydreaming, no speculative fiction, but is based on a methodical research of the spiritual. Certain denominations needed up to 1822, until they acknowledged the Copernican worldview as a truth. I hope it will not last so long with the recognition of this spiritual truth, also for social reasons that should be stated in the talk, which I hold in this cycle about the historical life of humanity.

However, the most paradox prejudices exist concerning the whole and concerning the details of spiritual knowledge. I have already mentioned two weeks ago that recently Pastor Rittelmeyer has written a treatise (On Rudolf Steiner's Theosophy) in The Christian World about that which spiritual science intends, and what it can become as a deeper basis of the religious life. One has argued against that: if already the human soul should rise to a spiritual world, it must not happen in such a way that the human being carries his mental into the spiritual world arbitrarily by exercises, but this has to happen spontaneously. One can say nothing more ignorant than this. Since just if this settling in the spiritual world happens by itself if it appears without the involvement of the human being, the human being does not come into the real spiritual world but only in the mania of some mental pictures which are not spiritual because the human being does not behave actively but passively. He gets to a life which is again dependent on the body, on some organic processes in the body, and then it is pathological, or is dependent on mere soul processes, and then it is autosuggestion or as the case may be. The real penetration into the spirit is based just on the fact that one notices that this can be only reached by activity, by the will. This only carries us into the real spiritual world. Someone who says, it is doubtful that exercises are demanded by which the human being should arbitrarily reach what he can only receive like by grace understands nothing at all of the real significance of spiritual science. However, today many people know nothing about the real spirit. Hence, they cannot get to a real consideration of the everlasting, of the immortal and the free in the human soul.

On two ways, you come out from that what either is only inner life in the soul or is dependent from the body. On that way one does not come out on which, for example, the Physiological Psychology by Theodor Ziehen tries it. If Ziehen says, we cannot think what we want, but we must think as the associations determine it, then he just shows that he distracts, actually, from the spirit with his whole consideration. One can say, Ziehen looks at the soul life in such a way that he oversleeps the real spiritual impulses of the soul. Hence, Ziehen can say, the main principle of the human soul life is that a mental picture combines with others either after their inner resemblance or after their temporal succession. If I have seen a friend at a certain place and see the friend later again, the place that was temporally connected with him can associate itself with him again. If the soul life proceeds in such a way, only according to these principles of association, then it proceeds in such a way as the body lets this mental proceed. There just the spirit sleeps. The spirit submerges in the soul life that is only dependent on the body. Since the spiritual begins everywhere where we make ourselves independent from the associations by inner activity. The spiritual begins everywhere where Ziehen stops talking, and where generally scientific psychology stops talking.

In two directions, one comes out from the mere soul life. On one side, we can come out and rise to the spirit, so that we can behold the supersensible in the outer world, after we have become conscious in our real ego, while we feel the body of formative forces, as we feel, otherwise, the physical body. However, we get to an even higher mental picture of our ego, then we realise, why to the usual consciousness this ego is hidden: this ego arises as little from the usual soul life as from the lung the air originates that we breathe. Someone who believes that the true ego is generated anyhow in the body believes the same in this area as someone who believes that the breath is anyhow generated from the lung. No, our true ego is inside the world that we perceive Imaginatively. There on one side we find the ego, while we arouse it, while we get from the mere sensory perception to the supersensible. In this ego, we find one side of the everlasting, that side which shows the seedlings of everything that we become when we go through the gate of death and settle in the spiritual world to return to following lives on earth.

On the other side, we find the ego again. It is the same. The human being oversleeps the real being of his ego in the usual life, however, he also oversleeps the real being of his will. If the body of formative forces dawns on him, that awakes in certain way which lives in the will. What does the human being know about that which lives in the will in the usual life? If he lifts his hand, he knows, it comes from his mental picture. However, the human being oversleeps completely in the usual awake consciousness how this works how it goes over in the physical body. This also wakes gradually, even if not in the body of formative forces.

Then we experience from which deeper impulses our actions put themselves in the world, we experience something supersensible behind our will about which the usual consciousness knows nothing. While on the other side we exceed our usual soul life to the spirit, we experience the spirit in the will, that spirit which was active in us, before we entered by birth or conception into the physical existence by which we have come from the spiritual world in the physical existence. Thus methodically exceeding the usual soul life, the spiritual researcher experiences his everlasting.

I explain in the next talks: how this everlasting is included in the contents of the beholding consciousness how really this everlasting is found because we can hold side by side that to which we come, while we pursue the imagining beyond the only sensory perception in the supersensible, and that to which we come while we pursue the will beyond the only mental-bodily into the spiritual.

With it, I have given something of the program of the next talks at the end of this talk. I hope, spiritual science will get beyond that dictum of Du Bois-Reymond with which he wanted to take away the ground under the feet from any spiritual research, while he asserted the principle that only that which comes from the senses can be, actually, science, and where supra-naturalism starts, science stops. No, it should be just shown by our worldview that in future a general conviction will be there which is based on the fact that where real supra-naturalism, real penetration into the spiritual world stops, science must die away also compared with the view of nature. Thus, we also realise that natural sciences themselves have more and more dead, dying away concepts, because the living contents can come only from the spirit. The spirit is the creator of life, and it can be the only creator of real, lively, scientific concepts if it is recognised.

That Buddhism and the teaching of Buddha should frequently be discussed to-day, is a fact of special interest in the study of human evolution; for an understanding of the essential nature of Buddhism—or rather the longing for such an understanding—has only made itself felt comparatively recently in the spiritual life of the West. Think for a moment of Goethe, who so powerfully influenced Western culture at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When we examine Goethe's life and writings we find no trace of the influence of Buddhism; yet shortly afterwards there are distinct traces of Buddhist influence in one who was in a certain sense a disciple of Goethe—I refer to Schopenhauer. Since his time, interest in the spiritual life of the East has steadily increased, until in our age many people feel an inherent desire to understand what really entered human evolution through all that is connected with the name of the great Buddha.

It is true that most people connect Buddhism, among other things, with the idea of reincarnation. Yet with regard to its essentials one cannot do so—at all events in the form in which this truth is now often conceived. For to those who have deeper insight, this linking up of Buddhism with the teachings of repeated earthly lives is almost tantamount to saying that the deepest understanding of ancient works of art is to be found among those peoples who set about destroying them at the beginning of the Middle Ages! Grotesque as this may sound, it is nevertheless true, and its truth is brought home to us by the realisation that the whole mood of Buddhism is to undervalue earthly lives, indeed its aim is rather to reduce their number. Liberation from rebirth—this is the innermost nerve of Buddhist thought. To be freed from repeated earthly lives—reincarnation being of course an already recognised truth—is the essence of Buddhism.

Even a superficial study of the history of Western spiritual life should tell us that the idea of reincarnation is not really essential to the understanding of Buddhism—and vice versa. For within our Western culture we find that Lessing had a magnificent conception of the idea of reincarnation and yet was quite uninfluenced by Buddhistic thought. His most mature work The Education of the Human Race concludes with a confession of belief in repeated earthly lives. “Is not all Eternity mine?” he exclaims, feeling that man's sojourn on earth may become fruitful if earthly lives are repeated. We are not on this earth for nothing. We are active in earthly life and we may look forward to an ever fuller life wherein the fruits of past lives may ripen. The prospect of a rich and greater future, the consciousness of continuous activity—these are the essentials of Lessing's thought. On the other hand, the essence of Buddhism is that it urges man to strive for such knowledge and wisdom as will free him from all desire for rebirth. Only when in one such earthly life he can liberate himself from this necessity—only then will he enter the state that may be called “Eternity.”

I have endeavoured to show you in the course of these lectures that Spiritual Science has taken the idea of reincarnation neither from ancient tradition, nor from Buddhism, for the idea of reincarnation arises of necessity from an unprejudiced observation of life in the sense of Spiritual Science. It would therefore seem superficial to connect Buddhism directly with the idea of repeated earthly lives, for to understand the essence of Buddhism we must turn our gaze in quite another direction. Here I must again remind you of the law of human evolution which we considered in connection with the great Zarathustra. [See Anthroposophy, Easter, 1927.]

In the course of the ages the whole constitution of man's soul has passed through different stages and conditions. The events of which outer history and outer documents tell are really a comparatively late phase in the evolution of mankind, and when with the help of Spiritual Science we go back to prehistoric ages, we find that the nature of the soul and of man's consciousness in those early times was very different indeed from what it is to-day. Let me briefly recapitulate.

In normal human life to-day we examine objects with our senses and form chains of thought with our practical wisdom and science (in effect our essentially intellectual consciousness), which has developed from quite a different kind of consciousness. In the chaotic medley of the dream we have a last remnant—an atavistic heritage—of clairvoyant faculties that were normal in the soul of prehistoric man. In those early times the nature of the soul was such that in a condition midway between waking and sleeping, man gazed into all that lies hidden behind the world of sense. Our consciousness to-day alternates between the waking and sleeping states and we think of “intelligence” in connection with waking life only, but in more ancient days pictures continually arose and passed away before the soul of man. These pictures were not as void of meaning as are our dream pictures to-day but were related to super-sensible events. Out of the condition of consciousness arising from these flowing pictures, our present so-called intellectual consciousness gradually evolved. A kind of primeval clairvoyance preceded the gradual development of our modern consciousness. Prehistoric man, gazing into the super-sensible worlds with this dreamlike clairvoyance, not only acquired knowledge but experienced a deep inner satisfaction and bliss as he felt the connection of his soul with a spiritual world. In his intellectual consciousness to-day man knows with certainty that his blood is composed of substances which also exist externally in physical space, indeed that his whole organism is built up materially. With equal certainty, prehistoric man knew that, so far as his soul and Spirit were concerned, he had come forth from the spiritual world into which he gazed with his clairvoyant consciousness.

I have said before, that certain phenomena in human history, of which external facts also speak, can only be understood if this spiritual origin of man's earthly life is admitted. Even science is less inclined to agree with the assumption of materialistic anthropology, that in prehistoric ages the general condition of humanity was such as we find still existing among the most primitive peoples to-day. It is becoming more and more evident that sublime conceptions of a spiritual world were current among ancient peoples, though clothed in pictorial forms. Myths and legends are only intelligible if we trace them back to a primal wisdom which was altogether different in its nature from the intellectual science of to-day. True, there is not much sympathy as yet with the view that primitive peoples to-day are not typical of the original spirituality of man but represent the decadence of an earlier time. Neither is it generally admitted that originally all peoples possessed a lofty wisdom, derived from clairvoyant powers. But facts will in time compel thinking people to admit, hypothetically at all events, some of the truths investigated by Spiritual Science and fully corroborated by Natural Science. What Spiritual Science has to say about the future evolution of man will also one day be verified. Thus we must look back, not only to a kind of primeval wisdom, but also to primeval feelings and perceptions in man whose clairvoyant powers gave him knowledge of his connection with the spiritual world.

Now it is easy to understand the possibility of two streams arising in the gradual transition from this ancient clairvoyance of the human soul to our modern intellectual mode of observing the material world. The one stream can be traced among peoples in whom the memories and instincts were preserved, and who felt that through his clairvoyant perception, man was once united with the spiritual world but has descended into the world of the senses. This feeling gradually extended into a general attitude of soul, till it could be said: “We have entered the phenomenal world but this world is maya, illusion.” Only when he was linked with the spiritual world could man know his true being. And so among those peoples who had preserved this dim remembrance of ancient clairvoyant powers, there arose a sense of loss, and a certain indifference to their material environment and all that can be apprehended by the intellect.

On the other hand there is a second current, of which the religion of Zarathustra is typical.—“We must adapt ourselves to the new world which now enters our consciousness for the first time.” These men did not look back with regret to something that man had lost. On the contrary, they felt impelled to seek and acquire all the powers that would enable them to penetrate and understand the surrounding world of sense. The urge arose within them to unite themselves with the world, not to look back with regret, but to look forwards, to be warriors. “The same Divine-Spiritual essence of which we were once a part is also poured into the world immediately surrounding us. It is in this surrounding world that we must seek it. Ours [is] the task to unite with the good spiritual elements and so help forward the evolution of the world!” This conception is typical of the stream of thought which had its rise in Asiatic regions lying north of the lands where men looked back with sorrow to what man had once possessed.

In India arose a spiritual life which was the natural fruit of this backward-turning gaze to men's former union with the spiritual world. Consider the Sankhya philosophy or the Yoga system and discipline. It was the constant endeavour of the ancient Indian to rediscover his connection with the spiritual world whence he had come forth; he tried to disregard all that surrounded him in the world, to free himself from the links binding him to the world of the senses and by eliminating this world to find again the spiritual realms whence he had descended. Reunion with the world of Spirit, release from the world of sense—this is Yoga.

Only when we see these principles as the fundamental tendencies of Indian spiritual life can we understand the mighty impulse of the Buddha as it flamed up in a last gleam across the evening skies of Indian spiritual life a few centuries before the Christ Impulse was destined to dominate Western thought. We can only understand the figure of Buddha when we contemplate him in this setting. On the soil of India it was possible for a mode of thought and consciousness to arise which gazed at a world in the throes of decline, of a descent from Spirit into maya—the great “Illusion.” It is also natural that as the Indian looked at the external world with which human life is so closely interwoven, he should have evolved the idea that this descent from Spirit into the world of maya had proceeded stage by stage, as it were, passing from epoch to epoch. We can now understand the deeply devotional mood of Indian culture—albeit a culture representing the glow of sunset—and how the concept of Buddhahood there finds a natural place. The Indian looked back to an age when man was united with the spiritual world; he then descended to a certain level, rose once more and again sank, rose, sank—but in such a way that each descent was deeper than the last.

According to ancient Indian wisdom, a Buddha arises whenever an epoch of decline draws to its close. The last of the Buddhas—Gautama Buddha—was the Being who incarnated as the son of King Suddhodana. The Indian, therefore, looked back to former Buddhas, of whom five had already appeared during the time of man's gradual descent from the spiritual world, and who, coming again and again into the world of men could bring them something of that primordial wisdom whereby they could be sustained in earthly life and not utterly lost in maya. In his descending path of evolution man loses hold of this wisdom and when it is lost, a new Buddha appears. Of these, Gautama Buddha was the last.

In the course of many earthly lives such a being as a Buddha must previously have reached the level of a Bodhisattva before he can attain to Buddhahood. According to Eastern Wisdom, Gautama Buddha was first a Bodhisattva, and as such was born into the royal house of Suddhodana. By dint of inner effort he attained, in his twenty-ninth year, the illumination symbolically described as “sitting under the Bodhi tree.” The wisdom arising from this could then be revealed in the great Sermon of Benares. In his twenty-ninth year, this Bodhisattva rose to the dignity of Buddhahood and was then able, as Buddha, to bring again to mankind a last remnant of the Ancient Wisdom. And when in the following centuries man again sinks so low that the last remnant of the wisdom brought by Buddha disappears, another Bodhisattva, Maitreya Buddha, who, according to Eastern Wisdom, is expected to appear in the future, will rise to the dignity of Buddhahood.

Legends tell us of all that was enacted in the soul of the last Bodhisattva who was to become Gautama Buddha. Up to his twenty-ninth year he had known only the surroundings of his royal home. Human misery and suffering—all life's sorrows—were hidden from him. He grew up seeing only the joys of life. But the Bodhisattvic consciousness was ever present—a consciousness teeming with the inner wisdom of former earthly lives. The legend is well-known and we need only consider the main details. We read how Gautama left the royal Palace and saw something he had never seen before—a corpse. At the sight of the corpse he realised that death consumes life, that the element of death enters life with its fruitfulness and power of increase. He saw a sick man—disease eats its way into health. He saw an old man tottering wearily along his way—age creeps into the freshness of youth.

We must of course realise that he who was to become Buddha passed through all these experiences with Bodhisattvic consciousness. Thus he learned that the destructive element of existence has its place in the wisdom-filled process of “being and becoming,” but so deeply was his soul affected that he cried out—so the legend runs—“Life is full of suffering!” Let us try to enter into the soul of Gautama the Bodhisattva. He possessed mighty wisdom, although he was not as yet fully conscious of this wisdom. In his earlier years he had seen only the fruitfulness of life. Then his eyes fell on the image of destruction, of corruption, and within his soul the feeling arose that all attainment of knowledge and wisdom leads man to increasing life. His soul is then filled with the idea of “Becoming”—a process of perpetual fruitfulness. The idea of fruitful growth proceeds from wisdom. Gazing into the world, what do we behold? Forces of destruction, sickness, old age, death. Knowledge and wisdom cannot surely have brought old age, sickness and death into the world. Something else must have been their cause! And so the great Gautama felt—because he was not yet fully conscious of his Bodhisattvic wisdom—that man may be filled with wisdom and through this wisdom be filled with ever-fruitful forces of growth, but life reveals decay, sickness, death and many other destructive elements. Here was a mystery unfathomable even to the Bodhisattva. He had passed through many lives, through incarnation after incarnation had accumulated an ever-increasing store of wisdom, until he had reached a point whence he could survey life from the very heights of existence. Yet when he left the palace, and life in its grim realities stood before him, the meaning of it all did not wholly penetrate his consciousness. The accumulated knowledge and wisdom of earthly lives cannot, in effect, lead to the solution of the ultimate mysteries of existence, for these mysteries lie hidden beyond the region of the life that passes from incarnation to incarnation.

This conception, quickening in the soul of the great Gautama, led him finally to full illumination “under the Bodhi tree.” We may express the results of his wakened consciousness as follows: “We are living in a world of illusion. Life after life we live in this world of maya whither we have passed from a spiritual existence. In this life we may rise in Spirit to infinite merit—yet the wisdom of innumerable lives will never solve the great riddles of old age, of sickness, death.” He then realised that the doctrine of suffering was greater than the wisdom of a Bodhisattva. In his illumination he knew that all that is spread abroad in the world of illusion is not true wisdom, for even after countless births, outer existence gives us no understanding of suffering, nor can we release ourselves from pain. Outer existence contains something that is far removed from true wisdom. And so it came about that the Buddha saw an element void of wisdom as the cause of old age, sickness and death. The wisdom of this world could never bring liberation; liberation could only proceed from something this world cannot give. Man must withdraw from outer existence and from his repeated births.

From this moment onwards Buddha saw that the doctrine of suffering was the principle necessary for the further progress of humanity. Devoid of wisdom was the “thirst for existence,” which seemed to him the cause of the suffering that had entered into the world. Wisdom on the one hand, a meaningless thirst for existence on the other. And so he realised: “Only when Man is liberated from the wheel of births can he be led to true redemption, to true freedom, for of itself the highest earthly wisdom cannot save him from suffering.” Buddha then sought the means whereby man could be led away from the scene of his successive births to a world which we must learn to understand aright, for many fantastic and grotesque ideas have arisen as to the meaning of “Nirvana.” One who has reached a point in life where there is no more a thirst for existence and no desire for rebirth, passes into Nirvana. What is the nature of this world?

According to Buddhism, the world of redemption and bliss eludes all descriptions derived from the world sense and space man knows in earthly life. Nothing in the physical world of space points to liberation. All the words man uses to describe the world around him must be silenced; they do not and cannot apply to the world of bliss. It is absolutely impossible to form an idea of the realm entered by one who has been liberated from the necessity for re-birth, for since it has no resemblance to anything in the objective world, it can only be characterised by a negative term—Nirvana. A man enters Nirvana only when everything that connects him with earthly existence has been blotted out.

Yet for the Buddhist, Nirvana is no empty void. Rather is it a life of bliss no words can describe. Here we have the root-nerve of Buddhism and an expression of its pervading mood. From the Sermon of Benares where it was taught for the first time, this doctrine of the suffering of life, of suffering and its cause in the “thirst for existence” permeates all that we know of Buddhism. One thing alone can lead to human progress, and that is redemption from rebirth. And the first step is the following of a path of knowledge which leads beyond earthly wisdom. Treading this path a man will find the means gradually to reach and enter Nirvana. In other words, he may learn so to use his earthly incarnations that he is finally freed from their necessity.

Turning now from this somewhat abstract conception of Buddhism to its fundamentals, we find that such an attitude towards life tends to “isolate” man; it raises the question of the aims and destiny of his life as an individual personality in the world. How could it be otherwise in a conception of the world built upon such a foundation? It was believed that man had descended from spiritual heights to find himself in a world of maya from which the wisdom of a Buddha now and again can rescue him, as the last Buddha had taught. Such a conception of the goal of all human striving could be characterised in no other way than as an isolating of man from his whole environment, for his earthly embodiments followed a descending path in a descending earthly order. How did Buddha himself seek illumination? Unless we consider this, we shall never understand Buddha himself, or Buddhism. He sought illumination, as we know, in complete isolation. He went out from his father's palace into solitude. All knowledge gained from previous lives must be silenced in a life of solitude, where he must seek an inner illumination of the soul which shall reveal the mystery of the suffering world. In isolation the Buddha awaits the enlightenment which reveals: The cause of suffering inheres in the thirst for existence and rebirth which burns in every individual soul. The world too thirsts for existence and this is the cause of all the suffering and all the destructive elements in life.

Now we cannot understand the essential nature of Buddha's illumination and teaching unless we compare it with Christianity. Six hundred years after the appearance of the great Buddha, quite different conditions are present. Man's whole attitude to the world and to his environment has changed. How has it changed? Oriental thought contemplates one “Buddha-epoch” after another. “History” is not a process of descent from a higher to a lower level; rather is it an effort to attain a definite goal, a possibility of union with the whole world, with the past, and with the future. Such is the oriental conception of history. But the Buddhist stands there isolated and alone and is concerned only with his individual life. In his individual existence he strives for liberation from the thirst for existence and hence from the cycles of his births.

Six hundred years later, the Christian has quite a different attitude. Putting aside prejudices now widely spread in the world, we may describe the Christian conception as follows. In so far as the Christian conception is based on the Old Testament, it points to a primal humanity when man's relationship to the spiritual world was not at all the same as in later times. We read of this in the mighty pictures of the Book of Genesis. The attitude of the Christian to the world is very different from that of the Buddhist. The Christian says: “Wisdom lives within my soul and this wisdom arises from the very nature of the soul. Wisdom, knowledge and morality—all these arise within me as a result of the way in which I observe the world of sense and co-ordinate my impressions by means of my reasoning faculties.” But in an older age the constitution of the human soul was altogether different. Something happened then which cannot merely be called, in the Buddhistic sense, a descent from Divine-Spiritual heights into a world of maya, but must be spoken of as the “Fall of man.” The Fall is bound up with the whole of human existence. Man feels that there are forces within him which had their origin in a far-off past and were part of a process which caused the human being not merely to “descend” but to descend in such a way that his relationship to the world was completely changed. If the conditions obtaining before this event had prevailed, man would have been a different being to-day. The Fall was due to man's own sin, even though he sinned unconsciously.

Thus in Christianity we are concerned not merely with the direct descent of which the Buddhist thought but, with an altered state of things in which the factor of temptation plays an essential part. The Christian who pierces the surface of Christianity into its depths must say that because of an event which happened untold ages ago, the subconscious workings of his soul are different from what they were designed to be. The Buddhist says:—“From a state of union with the Divine-Spiritual world, I have been transported into this world of maya and illusion;” the Christian:—“I have descended into this world. If I had descended in the original state of my soul I should everywhere be able to look behind the illusion of physical ‘appearances’ into reality and find the truth. But since another factor has entered into the process of descent I myself have turned this world into illusion.” The two modes of thought are very different. The Buddhist asks why this world is illusion and is taught that illusion is its very nature. The Christian asks the same question but realises: “The fault is mine! My powers of cognition and the state of my soul no longer enable me to see the original reality. My actions are not fruitful. I myself have drawn a veil of illusion over the world.” The Buddhist says that the world is in itself the Great Illusion, therefore he must overcome the world, but the Christian feels himself in the world, and in the world he must seek his goal.

When the Christian realises that Spiritual Science can lead him to the knowledge of successive earthly lives, he can resolve to use them as a means whereby the goal of life may be attained. He knows the world to be full of sorrow and error, because man himself has wandered so far from his primal state that his vision and his actions have changed the world around him into maya. Yet he need not alienate himself from this world in order to enter into blessedness. Rather must he overcome the forces which make him see the world as illusion and thus be led back to his true original nature. There is a higher man. If this higher man could look upon the world, he would see it in its reality; he would not pass through an existence of sickness and death but a life of health, full of the freshness of youth. A veil has been drawn before this inner man because humanity took part in a certain event in the evolution of the world. Man is not an isolated entity, an individual, nor is thirst for existence responsible for his present state. He is indeed one with all humanity and shared in the original sin of the whole human race.

And so the Christian feels himself bound up with the whole historical course of humanity, realising as he gazes into the future that he must find once more that higher nature which man's process of descent has veiled. He says: “I must seek, not Nirvana, but the higher man within me. I must find the way back to my Self. Then will the surrounding world no longer be illusion but reality—a world in which I am able to overcome sorrow, sickness and death by my own efforts.” The Buddhist seeks liberation from the world and from rebirths by overcoming the thirst for existence. The Christian seeks liberation from the lower man, seeks to awaken the higher man within, whom he himself has veiled, in order that he may behold the world in its truth. How great a contrast lies here between the wisdom of Buddha and Paul's words: “Not I, but Christ in me!”—words which express a consciousness that places man in the world as an individuality! The Buddhist says: “Man has descended from spiritual heights because the world has urged him downwards; therefore a world that has implanted in him the thirst for existence must be overcome. He must leave this world!” But the Christian says: “It is not the fault of the world that I am as I am. Mine is the fault!” The Christian stands in the world acknowledging that beneath his ordinary consciousness a power is at work which once gave him a clairvoyant picture-consciousness. Man “sinned” and lost this spiritual vision. For this he must make amends if he would reach his goal. In later life a man does not feel it unjust that he should suffer from the faults of youthful actions committed in a different consciousness. Equally, he should not feel it an injustice that he should atone in his present state for an act arising out of an earlier consciousness. This former consciousness he no longer possesses, for his intellect and reason have usurped its place. Atonement is only possible when the will arises in man to press forwards with his present Ego-consciousness, to that higher state described in Paul's words: “Not I, but Christ in me!” The Christian should say: “I have descended into conditions other than those ordained for me from the beginning. I must re-ascend—not with the help of the Ego I now possess but through a power which can live within me and lead me beyond my human Ego. This I can only do if Christ works in me, leading me to behold the world in its reality and not in illusion. The forces which have brought illness and death into the world can be overcome by what Christ fulfils in me.”

The innermost heart of Buddhism only reveals itself when we compare it with Christianity. Then we realise the words of Lessing in his Education of the Human Race: “Is not all Eternity mine?” That is to say: If I use the opportunities of successive embodiments to bring the Christ Power to life within me, I shall reach at last the sphere of the Eternal. This has hitherto eluded me because I have covered myself with a veil.

Reincarnation shines with a new radiance in the sunlight of Christianity and will indeed in the future penetrate Christian culture more and more deeply as an occult truth. This however is not the point at issue. The point is that the essential attitude of Buddhism makes the world responsible for maya or illusion, while the Christian holds himself, as man, responsible—knowing that the path to “redemption” lies in his own innermost being. In the Christian sense, redemption is also a “resurrection” because the Ego is raised to a higher Ego whence it has descended. The Buddhist believes in the “original sin” of the world and seeks liberation from the world. The Christian's conception is an historical one, for human life is seen as linked both with an event of a prehistoric past and with a future event through which he may reach a point where his whole life will be illuminated by the Being of Christ.

Thus Christianity does not point to successive Buddhas, recapitulating more or less the same truths through the successive epochs, but to a unique event occurring in the course of human evolution. While the Buddhist pictures his Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree, rising to enlightenment as an isolated individual, the Christian looks to Jesus of Nazareth, into whom the Spirit of the Cosmos descended. The enlightenment of the Buddha under the Bodhi tree—the Baptism by John in Jordan—these two pictures stand clearly before us. Buddha sits under the Bodhi tree in the solitude of the soul. Jesus of Nazareth stands in the waters of Jordan and the very Spirit of the Cosmos descends into his inner being—the Spirit in the image of the Dove.

The Buddha deed contained for his followers the message: “Quench the thirst for existence; tear thyself away from earthly existence and follow Buddha to realms which no earthly words can describe!” The Christian realises that from the Deed of Christ flows redemption from the original sin of man, and he feels: If the influx of the spiritual world behind the physical grows as strong within me as it was in Christ Himself, I shall carry into my future incarnations a force that will enable me to cry with St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me!” And so I shall rise to the spiritual world whence I descended.

Deeply moving in this light are the words of Buddha to his intimate disciples: “Page after page I look back upon my former lives as upon an open book; I see how in life after life I built a material body wherein my Spirit dwelt as in a temple. Now I know that this body in which I have become Buddha, is the last.” And referring to Nirvana, whither he was to pass, he said: “The beams are breaking, the posts are giving way; the material body has been built for the last time and will now be wholly destroyed.” Compare these words with an utterance of the Christ recorded in the Gospel of St. John. Christ indicates that He is living in an outer body: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will build it up again.” Here we have exactly the opposite conception, for it can be thus interpreted: “I shall accomplish a deed that will make fruitful and living all that from God—from primeval humanity—flows into this world and into us.” These words indicate that the Christian, through repeated earthly lives, comes to cry in truth, “Not I, but Christ in me!” We must however understand that the re-building of this Temple has an eternal significance in that it points to the in-pouring of the Christ Power into all who share in the collective evolution of mankind. There can be no repetition of the Christ Event in the course of evolution. The true Buddhist assumes a repetition of earthly epochs, a succession of Buddhas having each a fundamentally similar mission, but the Christian looks back to the Fall of Man and must point also to a further and unique event—the Mystery of Golgotha and man's redemption from the Fall.

There have been times in the past, and indeed in our own days, when men have looked for a renewal of the Christ Event; but such an expectation can only arise from a misunderstanding of the basic facts of man's historical progress. True history must take its start and pursue its course from a central point. Just as there must be one equilibrating point on a pair of scales, so in “history” there must be one event to which both the past and the future point. To imagine that the Christ Event could be repeated is as meaningless as to suppose there could be two focal points in a balance. Eastern wisdom speaks of a succession of similar individualities, the Buddhas, and herein lies the difference between the Eastern and the Western conceptions of the universe, for the Christ Impulse is a unique event and to deny this is to deny an historical progress in evolution—that is, to have a false idea of history.

The consciousness that the individual is indissolubly bound up with humanity as a whole, that not mere repetition but a great purpose rules throughout the course of evolution is Christian in the deepest sense and cannot be separated from Christianity. Human progress inheres in the fact that an older Eastern conception has evolved into a new one. Man has advanced from thinking that the wheels of world-events roll on in an endless repetition to the belief that there is meaning and an onward-flowing significance in the changing events of human existence.

Thus Christianity first gives reality to the doctrine of repeated earthly lives. For now we say that man passes through repeated lives on earth in order that the true meaning of human life may again and again be implanted in him, each time as a fresh experience. Not only the isolated individual strives upwards, for a yet deeper meaning lies in the striving of humanity as a whole, and we ourselves are bound up with this humanity. No longer feeling himself united with a Buddha who urges liberation from the world, man, gazing at the central spiritual Sun, at the Christ Impulse, grows conscious of his union with One Whose Deed has balanced the event symbolised in the “Fall.”

Buddhism can be best described as the sunset of a mode of thought that was nearing its decline but flamed into a mighty afterglow when Gautama Buddha appeared. This is not to honour the Buddha less; we revere him as the great Spirit who once brought to man a teaching pointing to the past, and the sense of union with a primeval wisdom. The Christ Impulse points with the hand of power to the future, and must live with ever increasing strength in the soul till man realises that not redemption but resurrection—the “transfiguration” of material existence can alone give meaning to man's earthly life.

Concepts or dogmas are not the only driving forces in life, though many may feel more drawn to Buddhism than to Christianity. Rather are the essentials such impulses, perceptions and feelings as give meaning to human evolution. There is indeed something of a Buddha-mood to-day in many souls, drawing them towards Buddhism. Goethe could not feel this mood, for through his recognition that the Spirit which is the source of the human Spirit permeates also all external things, he could greatly love life. During his first stay in Weimar, freeing himself from all narrowness and prejudice, he closely studied the outer world. He passed from plant to plant, from mineral to mineral, seeking behind all these that Spirit whence the Spirit of man descends, and with this all-pervading Spirit he sought to unite himself. Goethe once said to his pupil Schopenhauer: “All your splendid conceptions will be at war with themselves directly they pass into other minds.” Schopenhauer's motto can be expressed in his own words: “Life is full of perplexity. I try to make it easier by contemplation.” Trying to find an explanation of the origin of existence he turned naturally to Buddhism, and his ideas assumed a Buddhistic colouring.

In the course of the nineteenth century the different branches of culture yielded such great and mighty results that the human mind did not feel able to assimilate the mass of scientific achievements pouring in from external research. The sense of helplessness grew greater and greater before the overwhelming mass of scientific facts. True, this world of facts tallies in a wonderful way with Spiritual Science, but we see at the same time that thought in the nineteenth century was not equal to coping with it. Man began to realise that his faculties of knowledge could not assimilate all the facts nor could his mind gauge them. And so he began to seek a philosophy or a world-conception that did not attempt to wrestle with all the facts of the outer world. In contrast to this, Spiritual Science takes its start from the deepest principles and experiences of spiritual knowledge; it is able to compass and elaborate all the facts brought to light by outer science and to show how the Spirit lives in outer reality. Now many people do not like this, So far at least as knowledge is concerned, they draw back from the investigation of the world of facts and strive to reach a higher stage merely in the inner being, by a development of soul. This has led to an “unconscious Buddhism” which has been in existence for some time now. We can find traces of it in the philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When such people—and they are really unconscious Buddhists—come into contact with Buddhism, their longing for ease makes them feel more readily drawn to this mode of thought than to Spiritual Science. For Spiritual Science deals with the whole mass of facts, with the knowledge that Spirit manifests in them all.

It is really, therefore, an element of unbelief and paralysis of will, born of a feebleness of spiritual knowledge, that awakens the attraction to Buddhism to-day. Whereas the Christian conception of the universe—as it lived in Goethe, for instance—demands that man should not give way to his own weakness and speak of “boundaries of knowledge,” but rather feel that something within him can rise above all illusion and lead to truth and freedom. True, a certain amount of resignation is demanded here, but not the resignation which shrinks back before “boundaries of knowledge.” In the Kantian sense resignation means that man is altogether unable to penetrate the depths of the universe. This is a resignation born of weakness, but there is another kind whereby man can say with Goethe: “I have not yet reached the stage where the world can be known in its truth, yet I can evolve to it.” This resignation leads him to the stage where he can bring to birth the “higher man”—the Christ-man. He is resigned because he knows that for the moment he has not reached this highest level of human life. This indeed is a “heroic” resignation, for it says: “We pass from life to life with the feeling that we exist, and we know as we look towards the future that in the repetition of earthly existence all Eternity is ours.”

And so two great streams of thought can be seen in human evolution. The one is represented by Schopenhauer who says: “This world with all its suffering is such that we can only know man's real position through the works of great painters. They portray figures whose asceticism brought something like freedom from earthly existence, who are already lifted above terrestrial life.” According to Schopenhauer, the greatness of this liberated human being consists in the fact that he is able to look back upon his earthly existence and feel: This bodily covering is now nothing but an empty shell and has no significance for me. I strive upwards, in anticipation of the state I shall attain when earthly existence has been conquered and I have overcome all that is connected with it. Herein is the great liberation—when nothing remains to remind me in the future of my earthly existence. Such was Schopenhauer's conception, permeated as he was with the mood Buddhism had brought into the world. Goethe, stimulated by a purely Christian impulse, looks out upon the world as Faust looks out upon it. And if we in our time rise above external trivialities, though realising that our works will perish when the earth has become a corpse—we too can say with Goethe: We learn from our experiences on earth; what we build on earth must perish, but what we acquire in the school of life does not perish. Like Faust, we look not upon the permanency of our works but upon their fruits in the eternity of the soul, and gazing at horizons wider than those of Buddhism, we can say with Goethe: “Aeons cannot obliterate the traces of any man's days on earth.”—

“Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdentagen
Nicht in Aeonen untergehen!”

On 13 October 1882, a dying man went from a hotel in Turin to the railway station. He still died on the way to the railway station, lonely, not surrounded by friends who wanted to meet him as agreed in Pisa again. A strange man whose death, one would like to say is symbolically typical for the way, in which he lived. Lonely he died in Turin on the way from the hotel to the railway station, at that time, actually, only nursed by the hotel director who had foreseen his bad bodily condition. Lonely the man died, as he had lived lonely long with the best that he had owned, lonely in his soul in a varied life. A strange man. He inquired his pedigree. Now we may acknowledge his inquiries more or less as historical truth, their result became effective in his consciousness as we shall recognise at once, and we can recognise his work as intermingled with the impulses which he got from these inquiries of his pedigree. He led his pedigree back to the ninth century, to a Viking, Ottar Jarl, and led his pedigree further back to Odin himself. One would like to say, a proud consciousness might have arisen from the result of such inquiries. With the personality that I mean here, with Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), this consciousness changed into far-reaching, significant ideas that have become principal and indicatory for the complete intellectual development of the nineteenth century.

When in 1853 Gobineau's most important work appeared (Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, English: An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) which contained the results of his study of ideas, the few people who understood something of its contents could gain the knowledge that in this man not a single one but the consciousness of Western humanity had spoken in a particular time of its development. Ideas were contained in it that were odd to many people. But for those who try to consider it spiritual-scientifically the work is fulfilled with ideas that point more than something else does to the way in which an excellent man had to think at the middle of the nineteenth century.

This work was inspirited by the views that Gobineau received with his many posts as diplomat, above all in the East. The idea had arisen to him from an exceptional wealth of observations that were done with the keenest urgency that humanity took its origin from some original human types, which he saw at the starting point of human evolution, at different places of the earth, human types of different figure and different value. To each of these human types he ascribed as it were a certain inner wealth of developmental contents which it has or had to develop with the further evolution from its inside, and to bring to the enclosing life on earth. Gobineau saw the ascending development in the fact, that these original human types, as long as they remained unmixed, got their original predispositions and unfolded them more and more about the earth, so that the results of this development appeared as world history. But to such an extent, Gobineau said to himself, as the members of these original human types intermingled a certain equality of the singles begins spreading out about the earth; but he saw everything great, immense, elementary and continuing to have an effect in the human culture in that which arises from the different, unequal human types or races. After his view the idea of equality flooded humanity in the course of time, the inequality of the races was overcome. But at the same time Gobineau regarded that as the impulses for the decadent cultures.

Hence, he imagined the human progress in such a way that that what should happen will happen most certainly that the human beings will more and more intermingle that with this mixture the human beings become equal, indeed, but also worthless as Gobineau means.

In particular, Gobineau believes to realise that the Christian culture with its ideas of equality and general humaneness has, indeed, infinite value for the further development of humanity, but it adapts the human beings gradually to each other. That is why, he characterises Christianity as the religion that can never change into a Christian civilisation. Sharply he expresses from that viewpoint that Christianity leaves the outer garb to the Chinese or to the Eskimo that it leaves the basic structure of his religious being to the Eskimo and to the Chinese even if he accepts Christianity. Since Gobineau regards Christianity as a religion which is not “from this world,” that means it gives the human being something that can be effective inside his soul but that it cannot change in such a way that it steps outwards, that it becomes impulses which change the outer civilisation and outer civilised behaviour. He thinks that everything that appears in the outer civilisation and civilised behaviour were original tendencies of the races that were unequal at the starting point of human evolution on earth.

From this view, Gobineau got his strange pessimism. While he realises that the contrasts of the original human types can be equalised as humanity takes up Christianity more and more, that something just develops in humanity in the future gradually that what is the holiest, the most important Christian view which can become no impulse for the outer civilisation. However, for it the Christian view will lead, while it equalises the human beings, to degeneration at the same time, so that less and less strong impulses will be there for the progress of humanity, and civilisation will become more and more decadent. Once the earth will outlive the human race that will become extinct on it, because it has set out everything that it contained embryonically in itself and has no other life impulses in the future. That is why Gobineau believes that once the earth stays behind as a living planet. Humanity becomes extinct, and the portents of this extinction are all those impulses that balance out the differences between the human beings.

Surveying this line of thought, we have to admit that it corresponds to all requirements of the intellectual life of the nineteenth century which is given only in such a way as these requirements of the intellectual life were reflected in a great, ingenious man who felt the urge to think the ideas of his time not only to a quarter or half, but to pursue them in their ultimate consequences really. But as significant his ideas are in the just characterised sense, they could settle only a little in the consciousness of his time. One may say that, the name Gobineau was known to few people only, also after the huge work On the Inequality of the Human Races had appeared.

Few years ago, the consciousness of time appeared quite different, again with a person in whom not only the individuality, but also the whole time expressed itself. In 1853, the two first volumes of the just mentioned work by Gobineau appeared, in 1855 the two last. In 1859, the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) appeared On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

At first, we can see in the effect, which the work had, that in this work of Darwin something significant was thrown into the mental development of humanity. How did it work, for example, in Germany? As something significant it has worked at first, it also worked, while the leading scholars who believed to enclose the whole science with their logic related to Darwin's work at first in such a way that they laughed at him, because he believed to be able to speak of the transformation of animal forms on account of observations of the phenomena of the animal realm. One was used up to then to put them side by side without remembering how they relate to each other, and without remembering to bring the idea of becoming into the idea of the continual being. But it took few years only, and the work of Darwin showed its effect, in particular within the German research. There the courageous Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) took the ultimate consequence from the Darwinian requirements on the naturalists' meeting in Stettin (now Szczecin) in 1863 that also the evolution of the human being is to be brought together with the evolution of the animal forms. Those do not stand only in the world side by side, but have developed from imperfect to more and more perfect ones.

Not only had this taken place but something quite different had happened. The leading ideas of the Darwinian view penetrated into the entire scientific research, settled down in such a way that within a few decades the complete scientific literature was interspersed with that which Darwin alleged as an idea. Today we realise that those who have not yet understood that Darwinism just leads beyond itself in the serious research, even found an entire worldview, one may say found a “religion,” on the Darwinian idea. Strange difference of the destinies of these two persons: the little known Count Gobineau, and the famous name of Darwin whose ideas settled down in the minds. So that one can say, Darwin transformed the thinking of many people within few decades.

Someone can doubt the last sentence only who did not familiarise himself with the current ideas, which penetrate the public thinking, and at the same time with ideas, which controlled the public thinking before Darwin. In the answer to the question, why the destinies of both persons are so much different, something is contained of that which makes us aware of the task and the significance of spiritual science in the present.

If we look at that which was brought in a part of the human consciousness with Darwinism, we have to say, Darwinism is completely based on the thought that scientific consideration of the becoming can originate only from outer sensory facts and the treatment of these outer sensory facts by the thinking that is bound to the brain. Everything that would exceed such a scientific direction would be unscientific or would belong to mere belief in the sense of the Darwinian way of thinking that should have no impact on science. Those who look at the course of the events will say lightly, well, what in former times people have thought about the becoming of the human being corresponds just to imperfect human research; science was able to construct a worldview strictly by real, knowledgeable investigations only in the nineteenth century .

Hence, these thinkers say, science itself makes the human being refrain from all supersensible and confine himself to the course of events that arises if one limits science only to the sensory facts and to that which the intellect can make of them.—That is why some people probably believe that science and its thinking make reject simply any supersensible research. Is it this way? Today a lot depends on the answer to this question! If it were really in such a way that science forces us to omit anything supersensible from the observations, then someone who takes science seriously would have to take this consequence without fail. But we ask, what is this scientific necessity based upon which has arisen to the matured humanity only in the nineteenth century?

For Darwin and the next Darwinians was the reason, why they attached the human being not only as a perfected bodily but also as a spiritual-mental being directly to the animal realm, that a striking resemblance appears everywhere, for example, of the skeleton, but also of the other organ forms and of the activities of the single beings, if one looks at the human being and also at the animal realm.—In particular, Darwinians like Huxley (Thomas H., 1825–1895) stressed that the human skeleton is like that of the higher animals. This leads, one said, to the assumption that really that which the human being carries in himself has, all in all, the same origin as the animal realm, yes, has developed gradually from the animal realm by mere perfection of animal qualities and organs. We ask ourselves, is the human reason forced to take the just characterised consequence from these events?

Nothing is more instructive to the answer of this question than the fact that before Darwin Goethe in a peculiar way became a precursor of Darwin. You find the whole Goethean worldview not only in my book, directly entitled Goethe's World View, but also in the preface which I wrote in the eighties of the last century for the Goethe edition of the German National Literature. If we see how Goethe occupied himself urgently with the animal and human forms to get to a particular result, and if we consider the significant fact that he was stimulated to the basic ideas by Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744–1803), then we must say, a person with another way of thinking, with a quite different scientific disposition and spiritual condition than Darwin could also get to the same results, nay, could also feel the necessity of these results.

In relatively young years, Goethe endeavoured against the dictum of all leading naturalists of his time to show that an outer difference does not exist between the bodily frames of the human being and of the higher animals. Strangely to say, one had assumed such a difference details. One had stated, for example, that the higher animals differ from the human being because they have the so-called intermaxillary in the upper jaw in which the upper incisors are, but the human being would not have this bone, that his upper jaw would consist of one piece. This was the opinion of the most significant naturalists at Goethe's youth that between the higher animals and the thinking human being must be a difference that appears also in the outer frame.

Goethe went about his work really with scientific conscientiousness when he proved that the human being as embryo, before birth, has the intermaxillary just as the animals have, save that this bone grows together with the human being, so that it does no longer appear in the full-grown state. This discovery seemed to be significant to Goethe. We see in particular in the way in which he wrote to Herder at that time that he also regards the importance of this discovery, because he writes on 27 March 1784: “You should be also glad, because it is like the keystone of the human being, it is not absent, and it also exists! And how! I have thought it also in the context with your whole how nice it becomes there.” The fact that one has really to ascribe this to no materialistic attitude, but to the opposite one proves that Goethe just regarded his discovery, in full harmony with Herder, as confirmation and consequence of a worldview based on spiritual facts that the spirit prevails everywhere from the lowest creatures to the highest ones and pursues the same basic plan everywhere.

It was Goethe's intention to prove this, and the result just was evidence of the effectiveness of the spirit. Hence, it was to him also evidence of the effectiveness of the spirit when he discovered something that, actually, natural science found again in the second half of the nineteenth century that one has to consider the cranial bones as transformed vertebrae. Goethe meant that this spiritual has a basic form in the dorsal vertebra that transforms it in such a way, that this form encloses the organ of the brain. It was a quite miraculous fact to me in certain respect when I found a notebook of Goethe during my several years' studies in the Weimar Goethe and Schiller Archive one day. There Goethe had put down with a pencil that the whole human brain is, actually, only a transformed ganglion, in any ganglion that is already included as it were embryonically which the spirit transforms, so that it becomes the complex organ of the brain.

There we realise that that which the Darwinians later regarded as evidence of the fact that one has to look only at the sensory facts if one wants to explain the becoming of the human being became evidence of the universally working spirit as to Goethe which conjures up, so to speak, the most complex forms from the simplest ones and develops the work of nature gradually this way. Are we allowed to assert compared with such a fact that scientific observations would have forced the human being to found a kind of materialist-monistic worldview on Darwinism? We are on no account allowed to do it, because we realise that with Goethe the same course of research leads to an idealistic spiritual result. What may it depend on that in the second half of the nineteenth century on basis of Darwinism that we can downright call a kind of Goetheanism in relation to the sensory facts, a Darwinian-materialist worldview or even religion develops? That does not result from the facts which urge the researchers, but only from the habitual ways of thinking, because to a man who is spiritually different from those who develop a Darwinian-materialist worldview from the results of Darwinism, just the same scientific way of thinking serves as basis of a quite different worldview. This is the important fact that we have to consider. Then we also understand that the materialist-monistic way of thinking is something that captivates the human beings in the second half of the nineteenth century that intervenes deeply in the thinking of the human beings regarding themselves as advanced, and we understand that this way of thinking also intervenes where one does not want to be Darwinian.

A researcher offers a significant example who is certainly not enough appreciated today who has, indeed, something unpleasant in his behaviour who is still, significant his scientific results for the present. I mean Moriz Benedikt (1835–1920, Austrian neurologist) whom I have also called here in the course of the years. Moriz Benedikt is no Darwinian, but a development theorist. He admits a development, even if not in the sense of the Darwinians. One single result from the wealth of Benedikt's results should be stressed here. Benedikt intended to examine morally defective persons, criminals. Before in a more popular way Lombroso (Cesare L., 1836–1909, Italian criminologist) pointed to such facts in a dilettantish way, Benedikt had done such investigations already some years before. He examined brains of criminals, of murderers. He discovered that all the brains had something characteristic. A quite strange fact appeared to him that certain furrows, which are, otherwise, at the surface of the brain, run more inside with the criminal's brain, were covered by the cerebral mass and did not run outwardly. But he also examined brains of murderers who made, otherwise, the impression of good-natured persons. There appeared everywhere that in the back of the head certain irregularities were that the lobes did not completely cover the hindbrain, and that with such persons the form of the brain was like the brains of apes in a way. Hence, Benedikt got to the result that strictly speaking in this physical organisation of the human being, in the fact that it was not completely developed the reason would be of his unusual actions, so that as it were the lower animal from which the human being originated is expressed in the inner forms of the brain. Because the human being bears that in himself, which he should exceed, he becomes a criminal. Thus Moriz Benedikt founds his whole view of law, of morality and punishment upon the fact that, actually, with the criminal something is to be found as heirloom of those times, when the human being was still below with his original being among the higher animals.

As I have said, Moriz Benedikt is no Darwinist, but he also does not get further with his thinking than believing that one has to stick to ascribing such an organisation to the criminal that forces him to his actions from the physical. In anthropology, this researcher of the nineteenth century searches that what he believes to need for the understanding of criminal actions. Thus, we see that everywhere the mere belief comes along in the decisive of the outer sensory facts and of that science which founds itself on these outer sensory facts. We also are not surprised that Darwin's results were interpreted in a materialist-monistic way. Not Darwin's results demand this interpretation, but the habitual ways of thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century. One may say, if it had been possible that Darwin would have done research in another age, it would be also conceivable that his results would have been interpreted in an ideal spiritual sense as Goethe did it, that the creative, prevailing spirit uses the transformation of the forms to let the manifold phenomena arise from few basic forms.

This is the peculiar fact that the age, which is just over, had to bring the deepening in the outer sensory facts that for a while humanity had to divert its attention from everything that turns the view to the supersensible worlds, so that the whole web of the sensory facts can once work on the human soul. Thus, we recognise the necessity of the materialist-monistic way of thinking in the whole human evolution as it were, we realise that the nineteenth century was destined to divert the attention for a while from the supersensible and to look only at the sensory. If we consider the deeper sense of this fact, we have to ask ourselves whether humanity has gained something significant for its spiritual life by deepening in the sensory world.

Answering this question, we have to consider something that I have already mentioned in these talks that an enormous amount of important facts could be really investigated only, while one looked impartially at this world of facts. One did not let the view be clouded by any kind of assumptions of the supersensible world, but turned it only to the outer world. That is much more important and essential compared with the prime concern of Darwinism that significant, great connections were explaind between the organs of the single animal forms and plant forms. We have seen in these talks that Darwinism has overcome itself that, actually, the facts demand to speak no longer as simply as Ernst Haeckel once spoke of a connection of the animal realm with the human being. However, in spite of all that if one surveys the immense amount of research results which have come about just under the influence of Darwinism, one finds enlightenment of a big, immense basic plan of the animal and plant realms.

Thanks to this research, we see into connections today, which would not have arisen in such a way if one had approached them with preconceived ideas of an old supersensible research. Thanks to the materialistic one-sidedness, we have results, which one once will interpret in the right way, but which could be found only with one-sidedness. Thus, we must not misjudge the big merit of Darwinism and not neglect the fact that it is significant if Haeckel, starting from his General Morphology of the Organisms (1866) to his extensive Systematic Phylogeny (1896), puts together the resemblance of the animal forms and plant forms to construct, so to speak, a pedigree of life from it. It may be that his pedigrees are wrong—they are not—, one may abandon them, the idea of descent may be quite wrong with Haeckel, we can disregard what arises as theories with him, and look at that what shows resemblances and connections between the forms in a way unexpected in former times. This is the significant.

How does the supersensible research place itself besides it? In such a way that it shows how the human being can experience, indeed, a certain development in his inside, can turn the sight into supersensible worlds, can find a supersensible world of facts, and that in this the true causes are to be found of the sensory facts. We have realised how the human being finds somethimg enclosing mental-spiritual with supersensible self-knowledge already in himself which lives not only in such a way in him as he grasps it with his normal consciousness, but exists as something real behind the normal consciousness that we have to search in a spiritual form, long before the human being enters the earthly existence.

We have to search it this way that that what comes from father and mother connects itself with that which comes from a spiritual world while it experiences the events in the time between birth and death. Entering the spiritual world by his Imaginative, Inspirative and Intuitive self-knowledge, the human being gets to know the creative being that still works on us before the consciousness appears which constructs the human body where the human being could not yet work with his consciousness on himself because this work goes into the finer organisation and configuration of the body. The ego just works there, which comes from the spiritual world, on the finer development not only of the brain, but also of the whole body.

Thus, the human being is able to recognise without going through the gate of death that a spiritual world shines through the sensory world, which is as real for supersensible knowledge as the sensory world is for the sensory knowledge. If he knows his spiritual-mental essence working, and if he knows that this gets the forces and impulses from the spiritual world to create a new life and a new earthly embodiment, then he can also easily get that knowledge which connects the views about the human nature with moral ideas which brings together the views of the spiritual-mental being with that which the human being needs as a force for life, as consolation and security in life and so on.

All questions whether the human being sees his relatives and friends again can be affirmed in a quite appropriate way that the human being lives with his true being not only in the physical body, recognising and acting, but can also live disembodied where then everything that he founded in the physical life lives on in the spiritual world and forms the bases of a new incarnation. Those relations from human being to human being remain important in the spiritual world and almost form the starting point of our next incarnation, so that we meet the same human beings whose connection arises if we are disembodied, while we feel attracted to them, and get the forces to be able to meet them in a new incarnation again.

The human being is led by spiritual research into the sphere of a spiritual world, so that he does no longer find his origin in an animal form of the past world, but he finds his origin and that of the animals in the spiritual world. Spiritual science will show this more and more. With it, it positions itself beside what the materialist-monistic culture has done in the course of the nineteenth century. If we realise that a common plan of the evolution of living beings forms the basis that we can really see basic ideas and basic forces that develop from imperfect to perfect stages of life, then such a result gets its real significance just in the light of spiritual science. Today we can draw attention in this comprising talk only by a simile how the indicated gets significance.

If we see the human being in a later age and compare him with that who he was, for example, as child, then we say to ourselves, our spiritual-mental essence has worked on our outer organisation. The same that I realise if I become aware of that which produces thoughts, feelings and will impulses from dark soul depths has worked on my body when it could not yet produce this, when I was dreaming into my life. This body was still an imperfect tool for the mind and became a more perfect one only later. That which is purely supersensible what lives only in my thoughts, feelings, and mental pictures has worked as a real being first on my physical body, but I could become aware of it only later.

If one understands that in its basic meaning, one has also understood how the spirit has worked for millions of years only to produce the whole range of living beings in their ascending forms to produce the human being of the present in the end. As that which we are as a 30-year-old human being must arise in its internal spirituality by the fact that we work first on our imperfect organism of our childhood, the human cultural life could arise only because this spiritual-mental essence which is yet the starting point of any spiritual becoming prepared the human organism only slowly and gradually in the whole range of organisms as well as the single human being prepares his organism in the childhood which should be later the tool of the developed mind. As it is the same ego which thinks, feels and wants at the age of thirty years and which works on the outer body in the first years, overcomes it and transforms it into the tool of the mind, one can also imagine that the human being had to overcome with his mental life which faces us developed in the animal realm. The actions of the human mind which prepares itself only to that which it should become in the outer animal or generally organic figure, face us while we survey the connection of the outer creations.

What has the Darwinian attitude of the nineteenth century done without knowing it? While it has developed the outer forms so admirably, it has shown the actions of the human spirit when it worked on the outside world, before it could penetrate to its inside and unfold its own being and becoming. This will be the progress in the human development the intellectual culture that one will recognise that in that what the Darwinian attitude has given the whole action of the human spirit is contained. It has prevailed in it as our ego prevails in the childish organism. Darwinism has studied the divine actions of the human spirit up to now, without knowing it. One appreciates correctly what was created on basis of Darwinism if one beholds the creative human spirit in all details which are brought to light if one admires what the human spirit had intended, before it has got its conscious, historical creating. Thus, something great has been prepared that one only misunderstands, as if it is effective from itself, while it is the plan that the creative divine spirit pursued on its way to humanity. With it, the human being can progress a certain step and can only recognise really, what was done, actually, in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Now we turn our glance once again back to the Count Gobineau. There we find how the ingenious mind of this man realises that what presents itself in the outer world, but he sees it with the proud consciousness of a person who knows something about the fact that the human being is descended from the spiritual. As fantastic this may appear today, one has to appreciate in this context that there was such a person in the nineteenth century to whom that was a personal fact what is only a theory, maybe religious conviction for other people that we come to something spiritual if we go back to our origin. One only appreciates the unique personality of Count Gobineau if one can put his consciousness in the right light which says to itself, if I trace back what I am what lives in my abilities and qualities as they are handed down to me by my ancestors, there I find that the line of heredity goes back to the Viking Ottar Jarl, to the descendants of the God Odin, and that it does not end with a physical, but with a supra-physical being like Odin himself.

However, in this line of thought no hint to that spiritual-mental essence was included which works in the human being, not within the line of heredity or race only, but works in the human being from incarnation to incarnation which is independent of the outer physical form and configuration. Thus, Gobineau looks only at the appearance, which does not enclose the spiritual-mental essence of the human being. That is why he stands there as just a courageous man who does not stop at a half measure, but takes the ultimate consequences of his requirements, saying to himself: surveying the world, I recognise a decline of the appearance; humanity on earth becomes extinct, and the earth will outlive humanity.

This idea is there, as if a plant would express it, a plant that has developed blossoms and cannot realise that it can take up something from without that flies to it, that it can take up the pollen from another plant for a new figure. Gobineau cannot imagine that in the human being in his race existence a spiritual core lives which can take up a new spiritual element at a suitable time which is not in the original races and the intermingling ones, but in the spiritual-mental essence which the individualities take up and which fertilises the spiritual-mental essence of the human being from the spiritual world and continues the human being if his appearance drops.

So Gobineau could properly imagine the outer appearance in such a way that it is on the way of decline. However, he still lacked the view at that spiritual-mental essence of the human being who arises to the supersensible research. He could still substitute it by his consciousness of his personal connection with the divine world. But he remained lonesome with it. However, humanity had arrived at that stage where it found looking back the sensory facts only as starting point of its origin; it found its ancestors in the animal realm, while, indeed, the animal realm is to be imagined as I have just characterised it.

But if the human being can understand what works there in him, regardless of all outer forms which the natural sciences of the nineteenth century explained so magnificently if he looks at the spiritual world and notices the resemblance of his spiritual-mental essence, then he also admits that the spiritual-mental essence is fertilised repeatedly, so that the pessimistic idea changes into the wonderful idea of a human development in the future. If we look with Gobineau at that which was given to the races originally, that dies, indeed, which one can see externally, but inside that lives which can take up new impulses which becomes more and more full of contents, and walks from the earth which it leaves as the spirit leaves the corpse at death—to new creations, to create a new existence from the spirit. We realise that, so to speak, in Gobineau a courageous, energetic, and ingenious thinker projects from a past time who thinks the idea through to the end what has to originate from humanity if we turn our glance to the appearance only. Thus we recognise that humanity, after it has come to these consequences, needs something in another idea that invigorates the becoming in such a way that the everlasting is recognised in it which carries the essentials over to other ways of life, even if the outer cover drops from the essentials and really takes the way which Gobineau predetermined.

Any force develops by overcoming the opposing force. Gobineau had still received the fulfilment of his thinking with a divine-spiritual from his personal faith in his origin. Finally, Darwinism expelled everything that was no sensory fact from the views about the human origin and about the spiritual origin of the organisms. From the counter force which the popular Darwinism develops from the mere looking at the only outer world of facts the longing for the supersensible world will arise which already approaches and works in the human minds. The number of the human beings will become bigger and bigger who feel this longing who feel that the old thinking leads even in the most ingenious thinkers to such consequences as Gobineau or the popular Darwinism have taken them. But if the human beings realise that they can stop impossibly at that which is so seemingly firmly founded in the outer science, then they will ask for supersensible research, and then one will realise more and more that the supersensible research can proceed as logically and conscientiously as the outer science proceeds.

If we survey the connections that way, we recognise the necessity of supersensible research in our time, and then we easily recognise what this supersensible research, actually, intends. An idea of that which it intends I wanted to awake in these winter talks too. The whole cycle of talks was a hint to that which I have summarised today, and I just wanted to show with it in detail how spiritual science positions itself quite consciously in the present cultural life to serve it appropriately. Hence, one has not to be surprised that this spiritual science is so often misunderstood today. One has repeatedly to experience that this or that objection which I do here are later are put forward as their own objections by those who have listened here, so that one does not regard that that which may be argued, spiritual science has already removed. But someone who understands the course of the human culture, will not become chicken-hearted about the judgements which spiritual science experiences today in the outer world, but he will be able to point to the many examples that that which was regarded as a matter of course, for example, Darwinism itself, caused the strongest opposition at first. Examples of this kind are many.

The true spiritual scientist will always concede: even if some things will not last, it is not different from any other science, but the basic truths remain and settle down, because every true sight to our life shows the necessity of spiritual science.

Just if we look at the greatest men like Count Gobineau and the confessors of Darwinism, we notice that it is necessary to insert the supersensible research to the cultural life of our time, and that supersensible research almost corresponds to the longing of those people who want the true progress of the cultural life in our time.

Indeed, in the next time one will more appreciate various sensational things which happened here and there or even happen—if at all one cares about spiritual science or anthroposophy—as outgrowths of spiritual science. You can easily regard spiritual science as something fantastic, absurd, maybe also as folly if you limit yourself to its outgrowths, but it will be just more comfortable for a certain public to mock at the outgrowths than to deal seriously with the scientific research within spiritual science. You must concede at least that I have tried in these talks to apply the same logic, the same scientific thinking to this spiritual science as they rule in the outer science. The German biographer of Count Gobineau also said that against the ideas of Count Gobineau some people had something to argue; what Gobineau meant could be easily disproved, because any pupil of a high school could know this and could understand his ideas. But you have to require that thoughts of a pupil are not sufficient to understand Count Gobineau, and that you have to exceed what you believe to own as firm logic and must not stop at the logic of a pupil if you want to touch the nerve of spiritual science.

Even if the evaluation of spiritual science and its results will take place long in the way I have just indicated, there will be always single human beings who will yet realise that at least one tries to go forward in spiritual research with the same conscientiousness and with the same strict logic as they are usual with the education of thinking during the last centuries. Spiritual science should be recognised by this intention, not by some mistakes and outgrowths that maybe appear within it. The few human beings who will realise this will form the core of that thinking and willing whose necessity one recognises just if one goes back to the most logical thinkers of our time. That is why I have gone back today not only to Darwin, but also to Count Gobineau.

Those who form the core of such a human thinking and willing may still be alone today. Lonesome were all those who became bearers of such ideas which were matters of course in a later time. In the time in which science bore a materialist-monistic religion from its bases, you must not be surprised if spiritual science also makes the human being lonesome in a way.

For many people regard the real object of spiritual science as a non-existent object or deny the possibility of a knowledge of this object at least. But the human being cannot stay without knowledge of the spiritual. With it, spiritual science appears on the scene so that he does not remain without this knowledge of the spirit. We have to consider the outer sensory world like a shell of a crustacean. The spiritual appears as that which has overcome the shell, which creates itself by itself, by spiritual science. The outer science teaches what had to be overcome, and what still serves as tool that we have to use. But spiritual science will urgently teach that the knowledge of the outer shell of the being must not remain limited. It will show that we have to see the actions of the spirit in the outer figure that it lives in its results, and that it is the same if it withdraws into its place of origin, in its inside but that it has something in this place of origin that gives it a perspective to eternity.

Spiritual science will renew and raise—this was the program of these winter talks—a certain Goethean view which has given the whole program of these talks with a deep conviction with which Goethe faced the natural sciences of his time when from one of its representatives, Haller (Albrecht von H., 1708–1773), the words sounded:

No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.
Blissful is that to whom
She shows her appearance only.

Goethe replied what spiritual science always answers to an outer knowledge and conviction that wants to limit itself to the outside world. Spiritual science answers: you also recognise this outside world in its true figure only if you behold the real spirit. You will recognise what Darwinism has created in its true figure if you regard it as actions of the active spirit.—Spiritual science makes the human being completely aware of the fact that one also recognises the shell only if one recognises it as the expression of the spirit, and because one recognises the spirit only if one grasps it in its creating as it already promises in the current existence to raise new creations from the bosom of the future that it must become creative in its inside. The outer shell shows what the spirit has created. Therefore, spiritual science answers to the words:

No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.
Blissful is that to whom
She shows her appearance only.

with Goethe:

Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.

With it, I would like to close these winter talks. I would like to hope that spiritual science really finds its goal and solves its task so that it does not remain a mere theory, a mere sum of thoughts, but an elixir of life that works in the human being. It does not work only in the knowledge of the outer shell, but above all is inside effective so that the human being recognises whether it is a kernel or a shell, so that the impulse arises from a strong will not to remain a shell, but to be always a kernel and become a kernel.

My dear friends,

I must again in my introduction burden you with a small piece of news, and, since this is perhaps the last of our lectures before my departure, (although my absence will not be very long this time) I have to make this rather distasteful announcement. It is one of the results of those numerous attacks which are now occurring and is distinguished from the others which I have already imparted to you, by being perhaps of an even more vulgar nature than the others. In a publication which I believe comes from not very far away, and calls itself The Suisse-Beizique Outremer, there appears an article concerning the kernel of the social question, and begins with the words:

“What an abyss there is, when we pass from an Emile Waxweiler ¹ to a Rudolf Steiner! The first seems, at first obscure in his terminology, but his thought is of great clearness. The other develops his thoughts at a length which may perhaps prove clear to his intimate disciples but his thoughts seem to us eminently obscure. The German writer is a theosophist. It is said that he was the intimate councillor, confidant and inspirer of Wilhelm II. Out of deference we will not repeat the expression used by the ‘Rasputin’ of Wilhelm II, an expression which we have heard quoted of him.”

Now, my dear friends, first the logic, which in this case pretends to morality. Now as I have had in recent times to say many things about morality, this quotation does not fit in badly. First as to the logic which is a piece of morality. A man spreads a very vulgar rumour and says at the same time that he will not contribute to this spreading. He says he will not assert something and yet asserts it! That is the logic of many persons of the present day!

Now I should just like to bring the facts before you. Our friends will remember that, in the course of the decades since the 80’s of the previous century — of course there are some here whose memories do not extend to all these decades, but that does not matter. Some of those sitting here know that I have held many lectures, and you will know that all through that time, my only relationship to Wilhelm II was to ignore him altogether. Anything else would have been impossible. In face of the attitude which indeed not only existed in what was formerly Germany or in other countries, as far as I was concerned, it is obvious that here in this land, the subject was entirely avoided. I may just say here, because I have thought about the matter since yesterday evening, when I got the article. I have considered what my relations to this Wilhelm II really are. I have seen him once when I sat in the second row of a Berlin Theatre and he sat in one of the boxes. I was as far away from him as I am here from those sitting in the last rows. Another time I was walking down Friedrich Strasse and he was riding with his generals, with the Staff-Marshall. And then I saw him once again walking in a procession, behind the coffin of the Grand-Duchess Sophie of Saxe-Weimar. I have never spoken a single word to him, and have never been in his presence.

That is the truth, my dear friends; but today the possibility exists that the truth is not only distorted by card-players at their beer-parties and by gossips at tea-parties. That indeed has been done for a long time, but it is now done by journalists, whose papers are read today without anyone bothering as to their attitude concerning the truth. So we must put forward the question: What chance in the face of such baseless corruption, has a spiritual movement which indeed finds it necessary to say, “Wisdom lies only in the truth”, and this not from any external bragging, but feeling it as the innermost nerve of its existence. In the course of our observations of the last few weeks, my dear friends, we had again and again to point out that, if what I here call spiritual science is really to press forward into the world, it is absolutely necessary that there should be a basis of honourable, upright truthfulness, as regards what it has to say to the world. I have often drawn attention to this — that it is necessary for anyone implicated in such a spiritual scientific movement, to see that even in his most insignificant words and in the most insignificant impartations of everyday facts there prevails an absolute, literal truth. Because the present inexactitude as regards the truth in everyday life, has an inner force of growth. It grows and has a vitality of its own, and it extends to these things which can really no longer be characterised, because they transcend all measure of what is common to man, for in those human beings who in such a way multiply their culminations on paper by means of the art of printing, there is that which makes our civilisation corrupt. It is indeed true that as long as the conflict is not taken up in an earnest and upright way against everything which comes from such holes and corners, humanity will simply involve itself more deeply into those things which can be so clearly perceived today.

My dear friends, we must behold in such symptoms, what is now happening in the world; therefore it is here necessary that in small things as well as in great, all that opposes a sense of truth must be fought again and again. Anyone who has the smallest idea of what is really connected today with the personality of Rasputin, knows from what baseless, vulgar quarter such calumny comes. You see, my dear friends, it is not merely from the clerical side that the attacks become more and more numerous; but also from the side of the laity, many things threaten the spiritual scientific impulse which seeks to make itself felt in civilisation. I should really like to find words that have more power than mine have had hitherto, for this reveals itself at every turn. I really want words which have more carrying-powers than mine have had hitherto, in order to fight that which opposes the spreading today of truth in the world. One would like to find more force, because unfortunately the souls of most men today are really asleep concerning what is here meant by truth, and they forget the infinite earnestness behind these matters as soon as it has been placed before them.

I want to say the following to you today, as the principal thing. I want you to try, during the next few weeks in which I shall not be able to hold lectures here, to meditate on the feeling for truth, on the attitude towards truth, on the carrying-power, momentous sense of truth, and upon the dreadfully corruptive influence of the tendency to untruth which permeates the world so intensely today. Believe me, human thoughts are real powers; and untruths, even if they prevail in tiny things, are deathly for what must be designated as the spirit furthering earthly development. In the long run one cannot help in spreading what is most to further the earth, if one has again and again, to encounter pure untruth. So I had again to say this as introduction, in order that you might be clear that this might result even perhaps in esotericism having gradually to abandon what is passing among our ranks as a spiritual scientific movement. Do not think that these words are without importance. It is necessary that each should take council earnestly with himself, and should meditate on his own attitude to the question of the carrying power of truth, as seen in small things in everyday communications — and to untruth, which may appear as a corrupt, immoral, illogical statement, as in this article. These things differ only in quantity; in quality they are fundamentally the same.

You see, what I have said in these weeks culminates in the fact that we are facing the breaking-in of a spiritual world into our present world, which is the result of that cultural development which began about the middle of the 15th century. About that time everything became different in the civilised world. That which men before that time, had brought into their consciousness, dealt more with the inner being of man’s organism. You can find in old writings, in so far as they are to be had today, expressions which are very similar to our physical, chemical expressions, as I mentioned in the last lecture. But modern chemists and physicists will not really understand the things written in such books, for the simple reason that they believe that these terms refer to external processes. These external processes are not therein described, but inner processes of man’s physical or other bodies only. Only since the time of Galileo or Giordano Bruno has man begin to turn his attention more to the external world, and today we are so far advanced that we have a natural science, which has already influenced popular thinking, and even now popular feeling. We have a natural science which speaks of man, things in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, but can in no way give explanations of the being of man himself; not even as regards his physical, bodily nature. Today man must already put this question: “How am I, as a human being, related to what is in the external kingdoms around me, to that which surrounds me in the animal, plant, mineral, in the external physical human kingdom, in the kingdom of air and water, fire, of clouds, sun, moon and stars, how am I, as man related to all that?” Now we cannot rationally answer this, unless we recapitulate some things which we have had to observe concerning man. When we consider man as he stands before us, as a being of sense and intellect we can say: “We perceive through our eyes, through our ears, through the other sense organs which, although scattered over the rest of the body, are really Head-organs; through these senses we perceive the external world. We then elaborate our perceptions of the external world through those ideas and concepts which are united with our brain as an instrument. We retain something of what we thus experience through our senses, and this is necessary to us, to our inner integrity as human beings; we retain something of what we have conceived through our so-called reasoning intelligence, we keep back our Memory-concept.”

That, my dear friends, is in short, what we have taken out of the external world; something which was brought about in us by the external world through our senses; that which we have made out of this external reception through our intelligence we retain as our Memory-concept. What then are we, with reference to the way we as human beings face the world in the manner described?

Let us start from the simple phenomenon connected with the susceptibility of our senses, which I have already pointed out a few days ago. First of all you look at a flame, then shut your eyes, and you have an after image of the flame. This after image of the flame which you carry in your eye, disappears gradually. Goethe, who always utters these things imaginatively, says that the after-image re-echoes. It re-instates the original constitution of the eye and the nerves bound up therewith, after they have been changed through the light-impression which has fallen on the eye. What transpires in this way in your sense-organs is only a simplified form of what transpires in your memory when you receive external impressions in general, when you think them over and they remain in you as Memory-concepts. The difference is only this: If you see an impression with your eyes, let us say a flame — then you have an idea, a concept of the flame, and that resounds in you, but does not last very long. But now, if you take up something with the whole man, and think it over, you can always recall it later; and this greater after-image, this memory, lasts much longer; under certain conditions it lasts throughout your whole life. Now what is the cause of that? You see, if you keep that simple after-image which you have in the eye, and which only lasts perhaps a couple of minutes or perhaps even for only part of a minute, and then sinks down into nothingness, that is only because it does not travel through your entire organism, but simply remains in one part of it. That which becomes a memory-concept, goes through a far greater part — I will tell you in a minute what part — of your total organism; it then comes into contact with your etheric body, and passes through the etheric body into the surrounding cosmic ether. When a picture not only remains as a sense image, in a single organ, but goes through a great part of your entire organism, when it inserts itself into the etheric body, going outwards into the cosmic ether, you can retain it as a memory for the entire life. It is only a question of whether the impression goes deep enough, and grasps the etheric body, which does not retain it, but carries it out into the cosmic ether, inscribes it there, engraves it therein. Do not think that when you remember a thing that this is merely a process in your inner being. When you experience something, you cannot simply write it, as it were, in your notebook, although many people do this with their experiences today, and then simply take the notebook and read them off. But that which you remember, that you inscribe in the cosmic ether; and it is the cosmic ether which evokes it again in you, like the impression of a seal on sealing-wax, when you ought to remember it. Recollection is no mere personal affair, my dear friends, it implies an understanding with the cosmos. You cannot be alone when, as an inwardly collected man, you seek to recall your experiences; for remembering or failing to remember one’s experiences creates a disturbance in the being of man.

I have often given you the following example, just think what it signifies. A man whom I knew very well and who held an important position, suddenly got the impulse to go to a railway station without any reason, and buy a ticket to distant places unknown to him, in which he had nothing whatever to do. He did all this in quite a different condition of consciousness. During that time he knew nothing of what he really was, and only came back to himself when he was in Berlin, in a workhouse. The whole intermediate time was blotted out of his consciousness, from the moment he got into the train in Darmstadt, till he found himself in Berlin. It was afterwards discovered, from the accounts of different people, that he had been in Budapest and Lemberg; and from Lemberg had travelled to Berlin, where he came back to consciousness in a workhouse. Remember his mind was in perfect order, nothing was wrong there; he knew perfectly well during the time from his start in Darmstadt to his reception in Berlin, all that has to be done, to buy railway tickets, and how to look after himself in the intervening time, and so on. But, all the time he did these things, he had no recollection of his former life; and afterwards he had no memory of his experience after leaving Darmstadt; and no recollection of the whole journey. What happened during that time could only be ascertained by outside information.

That is one instance; I could give you many such. This is merely to draw your attention to what our life would be if there were not a continuous stream of memory going through all your experiences. Just think, if there were any time, (excluding that spent in sleep which you naturally do not remember) when you as human beings would have to think of your ego as if no memory were there. That which belongs to our sense-receptivity, to our intellect, is our own personal affair; but as soon as a thing becomes memory, it is something which, although a man experiences it in his soul-life, it is also an affair of the universe, it is an arrangement with the cosmos.

Now, present day man does not know, as intensely as he should, what I have just explained as a fact; but it will have to be one of the constituent parts of the future education of man; not to regard as a personal matter thoughts which in the etheric man lead to memory, but as something for which he is responsible to the whole cosmos.

My dear friends, when I began this series of lectures (GA 194), I told you there was once a time, to which we can go back is history when, as for instance with the Greeks, there was a land-consciousness, which did not go very far. This consciousness was then transformed into an Earth-consciousness in modern times; but in the future there must enter into humanity a cosmic and universal consciousness, where man must again realise himself as a citizen of the entire cosmos, as was the case in pre-historic times. The way to this cosmic consciousness, will be to feel quite clearly and distinctly within one, the personal responsibility for the thought which can lead to recollection, to memory. What I have described to you so far belongs, as I have told you to a great part of man’s organism, but not actually to the entire man. Now in order to characterise to you what is here the case, I must indicate it in diagram [see below].

Suppose this to be the region of the senses [white], in which I include all the senses; this is also the region of the intellect. We should then come to that part of the human organism [red] which reflects — throws back the thoughts we cherish [red arrows], so that they can become memories; that part of man which contacts the objectivity of the cosmos. I have already indicated to you the parts of the human body in which man comes thus into contact with the cosmos. For instance if you follow a nerve which starts from any part of the body and goes to the spinal cord — I will draw this diagrammatically — you will find that for each such nerve there is another also (or approximately so), which again comes back, and leads somewhere else. I have often told you that the idea of there being sensory and motor nerves is nonsense.

But the important thing is this: — that, in reality, the course of each nerve springs from the circumference, and goes back to it again. But that nerve-path is somewhere broken, just like an electric wire when a spark bridges the gap. There is a kind of springing-over, a sensitive fluid from the so-called sensory nerve to the so-called motor-nerve. Now there are many such places in our spine, for instance, and other parts of the human body; and they are the places in space where man does not simply belong to himself, but belongs to the cosmos. If you connect all those places together, taking the ganglia of the sympathetic nerve-system as well, you reach the boundary. You can say that if, as it were, you divide man into halves — (this is more than the half, but let us suppose it to be) — you can halve man and observe him as a great sense-organ; regarding the taking in through the senses as a sense-receptivity, and the working-over through the intellect as a further, finer sense-activity. Further, you may consider the arising of Memory-Pictures as after-images which, however, remain permanently during the life between birth and death because memory is created by contact with the cosmic ether. Our own ether comes in contact with the cosmic ether and so there occurs transactions between us and the cosmic ether. (That is the one half of man).

The other half of man, is that which, in a sense, has the limbs as its end-organs; everything which comprises the limb-system. And as the one half ends in the sphere of the senses [plate 13, white], so the other half ends in the limbs, to which of course the feet, hands, and arms are attached. This is naturally a very rough sketch.

Now, just as I have drawn as belonging to the senses, everything which is of the nature of intelligence, so I have now to add the inner aspect of the limb-system, and that is of the nature of Will. This Will-nature is the other pole of man’s being [orange]; and between those two lie the inner boundaries which you get if you unite all the nerve-endings, and all the ganglia as I have described. Now you go somewhat beyond this boundary on the one side, regarding it as a sieve through the holes of which on the one side presses the Will, on the other the intelligence [yellow], then in the middle you get the sphere of feeling; because everything which belongs to feeling is, in reality, half Will and half intelligence. The Will wells up from below, the intelligence descends from above, and the result is feeling. In feeling there is always existing dreamily, on the one side intelligence and sleeping on the other side Will.

After we have prepared ourselves in this way, when we have seen on the one side the pole of intelligence and on the other the pole of Will, after we have seen that the physical organs above are the expression of intelligence, we can now ask: “With what in the external world does that which is now man agree?” We have learnt to know two poles, two aspects of the human being — what is there in the external world with which that harmonises; which is there in man? The answer is — nothing, nothing at all in reality. We have in the outer world a mineral, plant and animal kingdom. With none of these kingdoms does that which we find in man inwardly, and which also pertains to the body harmonise.

Now, my dear friends, you will be able here to raise a mighty objection, which is naturally very pertinent to the matter, you will say: We must consist of the same substance as this external world, for we eat these substances and thus unite ourselves with the substances of the mineral kingdom, while we salt our food, and take to ourselves other substances, in eating plants. There are also meat eaters, as you know; and they unite themselves with the substances of animals, and so on. You see, my dear friends, the belief that we really have something to do with the substances of the external world in our own body, is a terrible error. That which our body, our corporeality really does is this. It has continually to arm itself against those influences from the outer world, even against those which come through the food we eat. Of course it is terribly difficult to make this fact comprehensible to our fellowmen, for the important part of our body does not lie in our consuming nourishing foods, but in excreting them. Many things we excrete quickly, but others only in the course of seven, eight years. But nothing of what you have eaten today will be within you in eight years time. By that time everything will have been transmuted; the activity of your body consists in throwing off and not in taking in.

The fact that you have to take in food has in reality no more significance for your body, than the ground for your walking; if you had no ground under your feet you could not walk, but you, as human beings have nothing to do with the ground; it is only there to support you. Your bodily activity must encounter resistance, it must constantly push against something, and so you must continually eat, so that your bodily activity should meet resistance. Just as we would sink into the soil if the ground did not support us, so would the body’s activity sink into nothingness unless it were met by that basis which is prepared and which permeates the whole body. You do not eat in order to unite yourself with the food, but in order to be able to mediate that activity which is necessary in the excretion of the food. For our human life consists in this activity, of excreting the nourishment; and just as little as you may reckon the soil as belonging to the sole of your foot, so little should you reckon as belonging to your human nature what exists in your food, in so far as it exists in the external world — that is, if you want to think the truth. Man in his entirety is nothing but a reaction against his environment, because fundamentally he is activity through and through.

Of course, what I have now explained takes place in an altogether different way for the organs of the Senses and the Intellect, to what it does for the organs of the Will-sphere. To this extent man is a polaric being; but what exists in the outer world has not much to do with what transpires in these two poles of man’s polaric being.

We have in the outer world the plant and mineral kingdoms. Well, this mineral and plant kingdom is not in strong relationship with our own being. If we want to investigate with what this Mineral and Plant kingdom is allied, we must look into that world which we pass through before birth, before conception; that spiritual world through which we descend into the physical. If we let our gaze roam over the Plants and Minerals, we must really say: “Before my birth I was in the spiritual world. I cannot see this spiritual world through my senses; I cannot think it through my physical intellect; but this spiritual world which conceals itself from me through a kind of veil as long as I am a sense-being, reveals itself externally to me in the Plant-world and in the basis of the latter, the mineral world.” That Mineral and Plant world have far more to do with our life in the spiritual world than with our life between birth and death. Of course, not those Plants we see in our environment through our senses, which reveal themselves to us; they are the effects of those forces with which we are connected between death and rebirth. The Animal world, too, has not much to do with what we are as human beings, but has more to do with the time immediately following death, of which it manifests as external polar-opposite.

So we can say: We do not know what exists in man if we only learn the environment of man in natural science. That Science which our present-day possesses, and which it especially values, is a Science which contains nothing of man’s nature in reality. You may thoroughly know everything which is investigated according to scientific methods, yet thereby learn nothing about the being of man, because in natural science today there is contained nothing of the being of man.

Since the last four centuries popular ideas have sprung up from the popularising of the methods of natural science. Even the peasant on the land thinks along the lines of natural science, although he may clothe his thoughts in his own words. Catholicism with its dogmatic materialism today thinks in the sense of natural science; natural scientific thought dominates everything. But we have now reached the point when it has become necessary to build up the social order. Over a great part of the civilised world today — which part will grow gradually until finally it embraces the whole world — there forces its way up the desire for the construction of a new social order. Men think of a new social reconstruction.

Where do the social demands that live today in civilised humanity spring from? From the absolutely subconscious impulses of human nature. What is there to satisfy them? The results of Natural scientific thought! Today in the widest circles, this is called “social thinking”, because these results are applied to the social life of man.

So it has come about that in the East of Europe, from the result of a purely scientific materialistic thinking, a new social order is to be erected by the state. Those men whom Dr. Helphand, who calls himself Parvus,² has — following the instructions of Ludendorf and Hindenburg ³ — imported into Russia, so that they could form Bolshevism there, are the incarnation of these scientific methods. We may even say that the practical proof of what these natural scientific methods will become if put into the heads of certain social revolutionaries through the services of Helphand — for it was he who conducted that sealed wagon through Germany, under the protection of Ludendorf and Hindenburg to take these men to Bolshevism in Russia — is the incarnated method of natural science which is at home today in Russia.

My dear friends, one should not overlook the scope of these methods, I have already pointed out certain facts. There are two philosophers – very common, ordinary philosophers. The one, Avenarius,⁴ taught at the University of Zurich, a man who certainly developed an extraordinarily narrow-minded thought. The other is Ernest Mach ⁵ who taught in Prague and Vienna. I myself heard him lecture at Vienna in 1882 in the Academy of Science. He always appeared to me as the very incarnation of narrow-mindedness and rectitude. If you ask today concerning the “state philosophy” of Bolshevism, it is not an accident but an inner necessity that it should be that of Avenarius and Mach, for these things belong together; the most extreme consequences of Natural scientific methods transformed into social thinking. Therefore one must take the matter earnestly. The scientific thought first blossomed as a social flower in the East, and it will blossom further, unless the root of the matter is attacked, in the scientific materialistic life itself.

The question is this, my dear friends. A certain wave of Thinking and feeling goes through the world; this wave is stimulated by the social scientific materialistic Thinking. While this wave spreads today, it lays hold of the necessary social thinking, but there it becomes a destructive power for humanity, an absolutely destructive force in humanity. The guiding, leading circles have not had the force and power to push into human thinking a real productive spiritual wave; and therefore the materialistic wave has arisen in the social thinking of the great masses of the proletariat. And Marxism which has expressed itself so grotesquely in the last four to five years, is the social blossom and fruit of a materialistic, scientific method in social Thought. We must not fail to recognise that this is the configuration of the present civilised world, otherwise we shall sleep through the most important phenomena and symptoms of life. One is not a full human being at the present time, if one sleeps through this phenomenon.

Certain humans beings, here and there, transcend the general judgment; they already feel today to a certain extent that, if we go Thinking and feeling as we have done we cannot progress, but shall only come more and more into Chaos. Therefore cries of the following kind though they are indeed rare today, do exist. Permit me to read to you one of these appeals.

In the 31st number of the socialistic weekly paper: The New Earth in Vienna there appears an interesting article under the title Crisis in World Views by Karl Polanyi.⁶ Therein it is said that a general opposition has arisen against the capitalist economic order, together with a deviation from Marxian socialism. There still prevails today an amalgamation of socialism, and Marxism which is the vexation of all modern thinking, each step in the intellectual solution of the most burning social problems of the times is shipwrecked in the swamp of this spiritual decay. The outbreak of the World-War was the turning point for all capitalistic and therewith Marxian thought.

“The leaders of men felt clearly and the masses felt dimly, that no longer do the so-called life-interests dominate the world, but forces of quite a different kind. The general economic interests, which the imperialists followed and against which the socialists fought wind-mill battles, really showed themselves not merely as unreal, and abstract and even to empty phraseology, but also as mere economic superstition, and empty brain-spinning. It appeared clearly that it was not the actual situation itself, but the mere idea of the situation which is the real power — no matter how false an idea is — it is that and not the situation which dominates the masses. Even the concepts of material interests, however concrete and real, will only become historically effective, when raised into a belief, when the sacrifices made are not counted, and in all the irrational things done in its name the personal value alone serves as a standard for reward and justification. Our time of incredible paradoxes believes in egoism. This is to longer denied, nor whitewashed in an idealistic way. On the contrary, humanity is entering on its death in the holy name of economic life interests, which it surrounds with a halo of glory, and of a sacred egoism which it has elevated to Heaven itself. The material is elevated to the rank of the sole ideal, and therewith the materialistic world has ended its course. The capitalists have already called this idealism of the material — as the sole reality and essential — the fatherland; and the Marxists have openly called it: Socialism!”

“Utilitarian ethics, materialistic understanding of history, positivistic theory of knowledge, deterministic philosophy, in our modern atmosphere are no longer capable of life. And Marxism, as a view of life, is built upon these pillars; but its time is past!”

This is, you see, the cry of a soul, who can only see the negative side, of what is leading our time into chaos. And now comes the question, the terrible fateful question: “What is to appear in its place?” That question is put but the author quoted, and he goes on to say: “The answer to this question is not clear as regards the fate of Marxism. To upright spirits striving towards clearness, this is a disorganised Thinking. If the Sun is extinguished, one would rather find oneself in darkness than regard a will-of-the-wisp as the Sun.

“Now what is darkening the Sun for our race is a new Sun, a more radiant Sun, rising on the horizon. Freed from the nightmare of the theory of evolution, in the treadmill of which we were condemned to eternal compulsory labour, without rest or home, to pass our senseless existence in the hallucination of a distorted apprehension of history which sees in world-events not even the echo of a town-crier grown out of the idea of a clown-like determination which regards our free-will as the chance-play of force, working behind the scenes; until finally reborn from the belief in a dead mass to a belief in ourselves, we will at last find the force in ourselves to found a socialism according to ‘Justice, Freedom and Love’, and to make this a reality for mankind”.

Indeed, my dear friends, a yearning soul who realises:”We are steering towards chaos”, who even puts that fateful question: “What is to appear in its place?” and who then continues with the answer by dishing up the old phrases Justice, Freedom, Love that have become word-husks. Long enough indeed have these been preached; but the concrete path is not contained in these phrases.

“The Marxian socialism merely darkens that question of fate before which humanity stands today. It binds down the free forces of a radical solution, holds thought in the half-darkness of an out-lived world of Dogma, confuses one’s actions with dim prophecies, obscure authorities and mystic symbols. It takes away from man his free outlook.”

Agreed, “It does take away from man his free outlook,” but this is not made free through phrases. The author proceeds:

“The Church has outlived its calling by a thousand years. Marxism might outlive us, but the new spirit which is to be born to humanity out of the sorrows of this World-War, will outlive Marxism”.

“But where is this new spirit?” asks the author, who, it seems has a feeling for the nullity of our time, for that which leads to chaos. Only one of our friends, one of those who has been in our world-view for years, adds to what I have just read, a few lines. What I have just read to you comes from one who sees something new must come, but concludes by remaining with the old phrases. But our friend adds: “Herewith we see a view of the world which perceives that Marxism, as it appears today in its most logical form as Bolshevism, belongs to an old Thinking. It is only the reflection of the old Capitalistic world; it suffers just as much in its spiritual life. If it is an opponent to the latter in economic life, yet in its spiritual basis it is one with it. But in its place and in place of the modern natural scientific view, there must appear a new concept of the world, which proceeds from an Anthroposophical view of a Philosophy of Freedom.”

These are, of course, a few lines which a friend of our movement has added but it is clear to one who looks with the affairs of modern man that because things are as they are, this Anthroposophical spiritual science will seek its way, and unless one admits that the process of the disease which is going though our present life can only be healed by anthroposophical spiritual investigation, nothing can come out of the chaos. In all humility we must therefore say:”If only a few persons could be found who, to the question: What must appear in its place?” would give the answer Dr. Kolisko gave in Vienna to this Karl Polany. As long as people believe the health of our movement is to be sought in any sectarianism, they will never realise the meaning of our movement. They must first see we have to do with something which concerns the World, a cosmic affair, then they will understand the sense of our movement. Only he can be a real bearer of this World-View, who in this way not only realises its meaning but can make it the innermost impulse of his own will.

I do not want to adorn with many words what I have said in these lectures. We have not long to wait before we can continue similar discussions, but I must just say that it would satisfy a deep need of my heart, if only many of you would take those words which I said at the beginning of this lecture, in which I wanted to indicate one of the most important things of our present world-position, and during the next few weeks would lay them to heart.

We have spoken of many of the evil influences coming from the elementary world at the present time. You know that an old true perception which we can only understand aright through anthroposophy, says that at the end of the ordinary year, when Christmas time draws near, these days come in which the spiritual influences which work on man within the earthly sphere are most intense in their working. Let us seek, just at this time — a time which for centuries was so important and essential to human beings, but which in our age is only a time for bestowing suitable gifts — let us seek something corresponding to the old psychic custom. Let us seek refuge in those good spiritual powers, who still seek to gain influence on our human destiny, but can only do so if we allow the full earnestness to work in our souls, which consists of the relationship of the spiritual world with the world of man.

• 1. Emile Waxweiler (1867–1916) was a Belgian engineer and sociologist.
• 2. Alexander Helphand (1867-1924), who called himself Parvus-Helphand, was a Russian socialist and Marxist theoretician, publicist, and controversial activist in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. After World War I he played an important part in the Bolshevik revolution and in bringing about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918).
• 3. Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (1865-1937) was a German general, politician and military theorist. Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) was a German field marshal and statesman who led the Imperial German Army during World War I. He later became President of Germany from 1925 until his death.
• 4. Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) was a German-Swiss philosopher. He formulated the radical positivist doctrine of ‘empirical criticism’.
• 5. Ernst Mach (1838 -1916) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, who contributed to the physics of shock waves. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and American pragmatism.
• 6. Karl Paul Polanyi (1886-1964), was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.

It will be apparent to you that what I have put forward here and elsewhere about the present social problems has its source in the foundations of Spiritual Science. And further, that there has been an endeavour to let flow into the Appeal I recently read out to you, the practical ideas which must arise from a deeper insight into the existing world situation. We should never tire of bringing before our souls ever and again the most important thing, and that is how ways and means may be found to call up the clearest possible understanding for what must enter into mankind, to promote deeds and actions, when there is right thinking about the essential nature of the social organism. You will have realised how radically different man's whole thinking, feeling and willing have become since the middle of the fifteenth century, and how the whole of our history, if it is to be made fruitful for mankind, must be revised from the standpoint of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch with its fundamental change in man's attitude of soul, The characteristics of the evolution during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch have had the result that in people endowed with a certain will – be it regarded as right or wrong, good or bad – that the thinking underlying these people's will, takes on a definite form. And from this thinking that has a definite form, in essentials the whole of our social movement is built. The social movement has its foundation in those thoughts that people are able to formulate in accordance with the fundamental character of our time.

In the threefold division of which we have often spoken, and which is the subject of the Appeal, the actual political State is really but one department, one member, of the threefold organism, though most people believe it to embrace the whole social organism, confusing it indeed with the social organism. When on the one hand you understand what the threefold social organism amounts to, and on the other hand you try to grasp how in modern life there has been a one-sided tendency to centralise the social organism, to let the State swallow up everything, then putting together these two things you have something important for understanding the matter. And to understand the present social movement from a serious standpoint is today the most vital necessity for man. For a long time people will still be groping in uncertainty as to what is to happen. It cannot be otherwise. The way it must be regarded, however, the way it must be worked for, is by widening the understanding of the social organism, creating the possibility for it really to be understood. From this standpoint it is extraordinarily interesting to observe the kind of thinking of the men who, in some particular direction, are active in social matters. Things must depend more and more upon our observing the way, the form, the structure of men's thinking, and upon our paying less heed to the content. On the most various occasions we have had to emphasise that what people really think matters very much less than how they think, and how their thinking is directed. Finally, it is not of such great importance for what is penetrating and decisive in the present world movement whether anyone is a reactionary in the original sense or liberal, democratic, socialist or bolshevik. What people say is not very important, but what is important is how they think, in what way their thoughts are formed. We can see today how personalities arise whose thought content and programmes are thoroughly socialistic, but who in the form of their thought are not very different from those who, over a large area of the earth, have just been overthrown.

We must therefore look deeper into what lies behind all this. For, as I recently said in Basle, as time goes on very little will depend upon the programmes that go around as if they had been mummified. Much will, depend upon people learning to think differently, to form their thoughts differently. Up to now there is only anthroposophical thinking that can guide men's thinking today in another direction, and for this reason it is regarded by many as something fantastic. It is, however, the people who call it so who themselves are fantastic, even if materialistically fantastic, for all the same they are theorists who cannot face reality. But what is developing will come from the way in which men think. It is just this that I want to dwell upon today.

Whoever pays heed to the ways in which the views of the proletarian movement have gradually been formed and developed up to now, must see how very various these views are. One fact should be of special interest to us today – that by far the greater number among the proletariat wholeheartedly profess Marxism in either its original or its more mature form. It is very characteristic how Karl Marx, having become acquainted with French social Positivism and then, from London, having studied the world of socialism and its development, built up on these foundations his extraordinarily arresting socialist theories which have gradually caught hold of the whole proletarian world. It is actually the Marxist thought that has spread abroad and has flamed up into the conflagration of this last catastrophe, as we have it today, and as it will continue to spread. Many even among the socialists refer to Karl Marx as if they themselves were Marxists. The one maintains that his standpoint is orthodox Marxism, another says that he represents advanced Marxism, and so on but everything goes back to Marx.

Now a statement by Karl Marx himself throws great light on certain aspects of this matter. Speaking of Marxism he once emphasised that he himself was no Marxist. Particularly in these times one should not forget this statement. For it is only by paying dire heed to such things that one notices how everything depends not on what is said but on the way in which thoughts are formed. Especially in our hard times the easy way of just building programmes will never meet human needs. And there is a way, even if a long one, that leads from Marx to Lenin who now regards himself as a true Marxist. To speak of Lenin is not to speak of a single personality but of a movement, which, if you like, is fundamentally open to criticism but from which the impulse is spreading widely. This movement, however, is also extended through certain methods considered by its adherents as actually being true Marxism.

Now the problem we have here is most easily approached when in the centre of our considerations we place the now prevalent one-sidedness that consists in handing over everything to the State, when in reality we have to do with a threefold organism of which the State is only one member. It is indeed interesting to follow up how Karl Marx formed his thoughts, and, quite apart from what he says with regard to their content, to look more at the thought structure. Whoever, for example, goes to his writings and reads them in the hope of finding some conception of how the social organism will be moulded, will be greatly disappointed. Statements such as those imparted by Spiritual Science about the social organism, in Karl Marx will be sought in vain. In the way he develops his thoughts there is nowhere a trace of anything of the kind. If in his writings you follow his national-economic views on the formation of the social order, you come to the conclusion that Karl Marx has thought out nothing new about the social organism. He has done no original thinking whatever about what the future of the world should be. He seeks to discover how those men thought who brought about the age of capitalism, and how the questions of wage, capital, ground-rent, and so on, were matured under the rule of capitalism. He pulls to pieces the national-economy of the capitalist rule. The most important ideas given by Karl Marx to the proletariat can already be found in Ricardo and elsewhere. Karl Marx says: In the capitalistic economic order, gradually built up in recent times, men have held the opinions from which have arisen the modern wage conditions, the modern capital conditions, the modern ground-rent conditions. And now he tries to think further. Not that he tells us what shall be put in place of this social membering that has arisen under capitalism; he only shows that under this capitalist system the proletariat necessarily developed as a special class
of human beings. That is so; that is a reality. He then goes on to show whither the capitalist rule is leading. He proves that it is leading to an absurdity, that having reached its peak it is obliged to change into its opposite. Capital is increasingly gathered into the hands of the individual until it reaches what is most individual, which at the same time is the community. However Marx and Marxists strive against the recognition of the word, according to Marx capital passes over to the control of the State, so that the State becomes the one great capitalist. But this then includes in the representation of the people created by the State, all the human beings taking part in that State.

It is on this statement that the most varied socialistic ideas of recent times have been formed. Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels worked for a long time limiting, modifying, elaborating, the original expression of these thoughts, as must happen with men who do not remain stationary but, in observing the world, develop themselves. And because Karl Marx' thoughts appealed deeply to the souls of the proletariat there now arose on the basis of Marxism a great movement which has taken the most varied forms in the different countries. The socialism that has developed on the foundation of Marxism is of one shade in England, another in France; it finds its most definite expression in Germany, and this has passed on to Russia. But the essential question of principle, the relation of the proletariat to the State, has become more or less nebulous. Thus the people have formed a number of parties within the framework of socialism, and these parties fight each other to the knife because they regard in such different ways this recent historic development, namely, the relation of the proletariat to the State. The most varied streams play their part here, upon which today we do not wish to touch. We will merely indicate the way that leads from Karl Marx to Lenin. For Lenin claims to be the most orthodox Marxist who best understands Marx, whereas numerous other socialists calling themselves Marxists are stigmatised by Lenin as deserters and traitors, and given many other names besides. Many, because of their attitude during the so-called world war, are given the name Social-Chauvinists, and so on.

As I have just said, an essential feature of Karl Marx' thought-structure is the lack of positive ideas on how the matter should develop, the lack in his thought of any solution. Marx only says: you capitalist thinkers have spoken and acted in such a way that it must bring about your undoing. Then the proletariat will be supreme. I do not know what they will do then, nor does anyone, but we shall soon see. What is certain is that you capitalist thinkers, by your own measures and by what you have made of the world, have prepared your own downfall. What will then happen if the proletariat are there, what they will do, neither I nor any of the rest of you know, but it will soon be seen.

If you take all this as I have just been picturing it, you will see the form of the thought. What is showing itself everywhere in the external world is simply being absorbed and thought-out. But when we have come to the end of the thought it nullifies itself, comes to nothing, fades away. This must come as a shock to anyone with feeling for such things. Studying Marxism one always finds that it is all the result of certain thoughts, not however Marx' thoughts but the thoughts of modern times. Then one is driven into an eddying confusion of thoughts leaning to what is destructive, leading to no firm ground. It is most interesting how this thought-structure, really striking even in Marx, in Lenin comes to its highest potency, one might almost say to the point of genius. Lenin points to Marx as if to an absolute opponent of the State, as if Marx had really started out with the idea that when once the suppression of the proletariat ceased, the State, as it has developed historically, would have to came to an end. This is interesting, because it is just those who regard Lenin as opponent who would like to throw everything on to this State in its historically developed form. So that in present-day socialist circles we have this contrast—on the one hand the strict fanatic of the State, wanting everything state-controlled, on the other hand Lenin, the absolute opponent of the State, who sees salvation for mankind not in the abolition—he would consider that a Utopia—but in the gradual dying away of the State. And just by observing how Lenin thought about this, we arrive at the form of the thought living in him. Lenin thinks thus: The proletariat is the only class that can come to the top when the others have arrived at what is absurd and are ripe for their downfall. This proletarian class will bring to its highest perfection what has developed as a bourgeois State.—Please give due heed to the form of the thoughts. For example, Lenin does not say as the anarchists do: Away with the State! That would not occur to him. He is opposed to Anarchism and would consider it pure madness to abolish the State. Rather would he say: Should evolution advance on the lines laid down by the bourgeoisie, then the bourgeoisie will soon come to an end. The proletariat will take over the machinery of the State, and will bring to perfection this State founded by the bourgeoisie as an instrument to suppress the proletariat; they will make of it the most perfect State. But, Lenin now asks, what are the characteristics are of the most perfect State? And he thinks himself a true Marxist in saying: What will be characteristic of the perfect State when it comes into being—and it will be brought into being by the proletariat, as the logical conclusion of what has been set up by the bourgeoisie—is that it will lead to its own decay. The present State can only exist as a State created by the bourgeois class, because it is imperfect; when the proletariat have brought to completion what the bourgeoisie began, then the State will have received an impulse in the right direction, that consists in its bringing about its own end.

That is the particular form of Lenin's thinking. Here you see in greater potency what is to be found already in Marx. The thought when developed comes to nothing. Lenin is, however, a very realistic thinker who, by reason of the historic course of events, has arrived at the conclusion that the State must be brought to fulfillment; so far it has not died because, not having come to full development, it has preserved its life-forces. When the proletariat have perfected it, the ground will have been prepared for its gradual disappearance.

Thus you see a conception that has been formed out of reality, and this conception has the tendency to extend its reality over a great part of eastern Europe. It is no mere conception, it passes over into reality. The proletarian says: You bourgeois have made this State arise; you have used it as an instrument for suppressing the proletariat; it is the State of a privileged class. It serves you for the suppression of the proletarian classes and owes to this its ability to live. Now the proletariat will arise, will do away with class rule and bring the State to full maturity; then the State will no longer be able to live, then it will die.—And something will arise that should arise, but as Lenin says, no one can tell what. Social ignorabimus—this is what comes of this socialism. It is very interesting; for the way of thinking that has grasped the social conception today has developed out of science, and as science from its one-sided standpoint, has justly arrived at its ignorabimus, (we can know nothing) socialistic thinking, too, has come to the socialistic ignorabimus. This connection should be duly recognised. Without all that is being taught at the good bourgeois Universities about the scientific outlook on the world, there would be no socialism. Socialism is a child of the bourgeoisie; so too is bolshevism. There lies the deeper connection that must above all be understood. Now that these forms of thought have been made clear, we are able to refer to important points in the kind of outlook of such a man as Lenin. He lays special weight, for example, on the fact that within the bourgeois State bureaucracy has developed—the military machine, as he calls it. This bureaucratic military machine has arisen because it is needed by the leading classes to suppress the proletarian classes. Bolshevism, the most advanced wing of socialism, is quite clear that it can only realise its aims through an armed proletariat. Without arms there would be no hope of this, as can be seen in the historic example of the French Commune, which could act only so long as those who were in power had arms. The moment they were disarmed they were powerless. That is one thing to be remembered—the organisation of the proletariat as an armed force. And then what should be done with than? To some extent it is happening even, now. It is supposed to teach us that many who have long been sleeping deeply should awake where social matters are concerned. And what should happen? Before all else, the State as a class government is to cease. What the bourgeoisie have founded as a class State is to be taken over by an armed labour force. Again it is interesting that in clear and plain terms those who have developed the form of modern socialistic thought, to a point amounting almost to genius, make evident what, through historical evolution, has been placed in the souls of the proletariat.

Lenin shows, for example, that instead of officials and a military hierarchy there would have to be a kind of managing body composed only of elected members. He further shows that in the present condition of things all the education needed for this State management would be what is given in ordinary schools. Lenin himself uses a remarkable expression which says much. He says that what today is called the State should be transformed into a great factory with public book-keeping. To bring that about, to control it and so on, all that is needed would be the four rules of arithmetic, learnt at any ordinary school.

One should not just make fun of these things but see clearly how such an outlook is nothing but the final consequence of bourgeois evolution. Just as the modern social structure is given up entirely to economics, we have to own that capitalists, those who direct capital, mostly have no more in their heads than what Lenin asks of the modern overseer of labour.

Had there been men to whom the proletarian, as he has recently evolved, could have looked, in whose special capabilities he could have believed, and to whom he could have looked up as to certain justified authority, everything would have taken a different form. But there is no one of the kind to whom he can turn. He can look only to those who, when all is said and done, are no different in spiritual qualities from himself, but have only been before him in acquiring capital. He finds no difference between himself and those who are directing. That becomes evident in Lenin's words in a very theoretical form.

In Lenin's radical formulas it can be seen how things have gone. And this exclamation will undoubtedly be on the tip of your tongues: Yes, but such dreadful things come to light in all this, it is all horrible!—Nevertheless it is our duty to look squarely at the matter and to make a real effort to enter into men's thoughts. When what is happening here or there in the ranks of the more advanced socialists is reported, one may often meet with bourgeois indignation, which in many cases becomes bourgeois cowardice. For the urge to understand is not yet very great.

Now in any case the following must be understood, namely, what is in part already happening and what is still to happen. Lenin, who regards himself as a true Marxist, indicates how already through Marx a definite outlook on the recent and future evolution of the social ordering has been brought about. These people think that actually the new social formation must be accomplished in two phases. The first phase is when the proletariat take over the bourgeois State, which Lenin considers must, when matured, die a natural death. The proletariat will step in and bring to its end what, out of their own outlooks and impulses, they will have been able to make of the bourgeois State. According to Marx himself, it cannot at present lead to any desirable conditions. And in the sense of both Leninism and Marxism where will this first social stage lead? If we express it in a simple fashion, but as the people themselves would express it, it leads to this—that no man can eat who does not work, that everyone has special work to do and by virtue of this work has a claim to the articles essential to support life. The people are, however, quite clear that no possible equality between men would be promoted in this way, but that inequality would continue. Neither would a man receives thus the proceeds of his labour. Both Marx and Lenin have emphasised this. All that is necessary for schooling, for public services, and so on, must be withheld by the community, that is, by the State—or whatever we shall call what remains of the middle-class ordering of the world. According to this kind of socialism, Lasalle's old ideas of right to the full proceeds from labour will naturally have to go by the board. No equality results from this either, for conditions bring it about that even those who do the same work have different claims to make on life. This socialism naturally accepts that, but again inequality is immediately created. In short, these socialists take the view that in the first phase the socialist order simply continues the bourgeois order, only this bourgeois order is run by the proletariat. How outspokenly Lenin expresses himself about it is of great interest. For example, in a passage of his work State and Revolution he says: Something like a bourgeois order, a bourgeois State will arise, but without the bourgeoisie.

From these words of Lenin's, that a bourgeois State will be there without the bourgeoisie, you can see what I am always emphasising and what I regard as particularly important, that is, that those who today are thinking on socialistic lines are only taking over the heritage of the bourgeoisie. Their thoughts are bourgeois thoughts. A man who has such a genius for putting his thoughts into form as Lenin, says that the next phase will be a bourgeois State without the bourgeoisie, who will be either exterminated or made into a caste of servers. This will never bring equality, for it only means the proletariat coming to the fore and being elected instead of being nominated and decorated by something in the nature of a monarchy. The proletariat will govern and at the same time pass laws. It is still, however, the bourgeois State, but with no bourgeoisie.

This by no means produces an ideal condition. If anyone asks what these people will have made of the ordering of human society Lenin will simply answer: we have promised you nothing more than a first phase, in which we shall carry to its final conclusion what you founded as a bourgeois State; but it is we who now run it, we as proletarians. Formerly you did it, now it is for us to do. We, however, shall run this bourgeois State that you have made without the bourgeoisie. Everyone will earn according to his labour, but inequality will still remain.

Lenin says that the bourgeois State without the bourgeoisie will lead to the dying-out of the State. It will be completely extinct when the community has once realised the ordering considered as the ideal, and when an end will have been made of the narrow concept of justice held by the middle-class where, with the hard-heartedness of a Shylock, account is taken as to whether one man has worked a half-hour less or been paid more than another. This narrow outlook will be overcome only at the end of the first phase. Until then the Shylock attitude of the bourgeoisie State will persist and naturally become intensified. Thus it will prevail during the first phase of socialists.

Here you have all that these people promise to begin with: What you made for your caste we will use for the proletariat. It is nonsense to speak of democracy, for democracy would lead merely to the suppression of the minority. The proletariat will do the same as you have done. But by doing so it will bring to an end everything to which you gave a semblance of life. Then only can the second phase come.

Karl Marx already alluded to this second phase; Lenin has done so also but in a remarkable way. I consider it most important to bear this in mind. Marx in the person of Lenin says: We will drive the bourgeois order to its logical conclusion, then what is now the State will die out and the people will have became used to no longer needing a constitutional State, or any form of State; it will just cease. Everything the State has to do will have ceased to be necessary. The age will then be past in which wages are paid in accordance with the principle that whoever does not work may not eat. That is just the first phase of socialism. The time will then come when everyone will be able to live according to his capacities and his needs, and not according to the work he does. That will be the higher stage to which everything now striven for is merely a preparation. When it is no longer asked exactly how long a man has worked, the time will have come when the value of spiritual work and the work of the artist will be rightly assessed; each man will find his right place in the social order, that is in accordance with Nature, each out of his own capacities will not only be able but also willing to work. For through the civilising influence of the first phase men will have become accustomed to regard work not as a mere necessity but as something they feel the urge to do. Thus everyone will receive his livelihood according to his needs. The middle-class ordering of rights in the spirit of Shylock will no longer be needed, nor the question whether a half hour more or less has been worked; it will be seen that whoever has a certain piece of work to do may perhaps need to work two whole hours less. In short, everyone will work according to his capacities and be maintained according to his needs. That is the higher order. The intermediate stages needed at present—because the bourgeois State in order to perish must go on developing—lead to conditions in which people on the one hand say: Ignorabimus, we do not know, and on the other hand affirm that these conditions would bring about a second higher stage of socialism.

What Lenin says about this higher phase of socialism is most interesting. He calls it ignorance to maintain the possibility of people, as they are today, being able to realise a social order in which everyone could live according to his capacities and needs. For it does not occur to anyone who is a socialist to promise that the more highly developed phase of communism is bound to come about. Those times foreseen by the great socialists presuppose a productivity and a race of men far removed from those of today, far removed from present-day man who is calmly capable of stealing underclothing and who cries for the moon. This is extraordinarily significant. We have a first phase—socialism with present-day man, and the logical end of the bourgeois world-order, of the State that dies by reason of its inherent qualities. We have a higher phase with people who will have become quite different from what they are today, in effect a new race.

You see here the ideal in abstraction. First the bourgeois order will come to an end by developing into what is absurd. The State will thus be brought to an end, and through this process a new human race will be bred, the members of which will be accustomed to work according to their capacities and live according to their needs. Then it will be impossible for anyone to steal because, just as today the respectable rebel when some lady is insulted, then, the respectable will rebel of themselves. No military or bureaucratic caste will he needed to interfere, and so on and so forth. And upon what is this belief based? On the superstitious belief in the economic order! Capitalism, for its part, has produced an economic order with only an ideology and no spiritual life as counterbalance. This state of things the socialists want to carry to extremes. Away with everything except the economic life! Then they think this will produce a different race of men.

It is most important to be alive to this superstition where the economic life is concerned. For today, in accordance with all this, a tremendous number of people imagine that when the economic life, in their sense, will have been set up, not only a desirable social order will arise but even a new human race will be bred—a race fitted for this desirable social order.

All this is the modern form of superstition, which is unable to accept the standpoint that behind all external economic and materialistic actuality there lies the spiritual with its impulses. And men must receive this as something spiritual. What I have been referring to is a misunderstanding of the spiritual. If mankind is to be healed, this is possible only by spiritual means, by men receiving into themselves spiritual impulses as spiritual knowledge, as social thinking and social feeling established on the foundations of Spiritual Science. The new man will never be brought forth through economic evolution, but entirely from within outwards. For that, the spiritual life must be free and independent. A spiritual life as developed during recent centuries, formerly chained to the financial State as now to the economic, will never be able really to create the new man.

For this reason, on the one hand freedom in the life of spirit must be striven for by giving this spiritual life its own department. On the other hand there must be an effort to guide the economic life purely as such, so that the State, which has to do only with the relation of man to man, should not be concerned with economy. For the economic life will use up anything that presses into its sphere. In so far as man stands within the economic life he too will be used, and he must continually be rescuing himself from this fate. He will be able to do so when he sets up en appropriate relation between man and man, and that is brought about in a rightly organised State. Unbiased observation of things as they are today, enables us to say that what is fundamental in the impulses developed by the modern social movement is that these impulses are full of a thinking that leads to nothing. Just picture this to yourselves! Anyone properly applying this kind of thought would argue in the following way: I want to think out the most perfect form of modern educational method. I come to see that human beings must be so instructed that they absorb as much as possible of the principle of death, so that when they come to maturity they may begin at once to die. That thought if really grasped would nullify itself. But take Lenin's thoughts about the State—as soon as it is matured it prepares to die. Thus you see that modern thinking can arrive at nothing productive, nothing fruitful, nothing for the spiritual life. For the spiritual life has become a mere ideology, only surrounded by thoughts, or natural laws which are themselves just thoughts, and because of this, because the spiritual life is at the mercy of the economic life or of the political life, it has become unfruitful. This has been made particularly evident by the war catastrophe. Just consider how much depended upon this spiritual life. And everywhere on earth, in the most dreadful way, its fetters have been shown.

And now consider the sphere of the life of the State. The socialists, thinking to their logical conclusion the half-thoughts of the middle-class, think out a State with the peculiar characteristic of bringing about its own death. And in the sphere of economic life everyone indulges in the worn-out superstition that this economic life—that in reality consumes life, for which reason the other two departments are necessary to help the economy too to keep its place—that this economic life will bring forth a new human race.

In no sphere has modern thinking succeeded in arriving at anything capable of producing conditions for a prosperous life. But what is sought on the grounds of Spiritual Science in this domain is to shape conditions worthy of life out of those deserving death. Then, however, it will not be enough—as many hope and as here and there it has already been done—that those who were formerly the underlings should now he supreme, and those formerly supreme the underlings. Those now underlings, when at the top thought in reactionary terms, bourgeois terms; those now supreme think socialistically. But the form of the thoughts is fragmentally the same. For it is not a question of what one thinks but of how one thinks. Once this is understood it gives the initial impulse towards understanding the threef0ld nature of the social organism, which enters right into reality and has to do with all that must develop as a healthy social organism. The most important thing for these times must be produced out of anthroposophical knowledge, and we must guard ourselves from misunderstanding this most deeply serious and significant side of our Anthroposophical Movement. But we do misunderstand it when we allow ourselves, especially in this sphere of Anthroposophy, to be carried away by any kind of sectarianism. Everyone should take counsel with himself concerning the question: How much sectarianism is there still in me? For the modern human Movement must aim at driving out everything sectarian, at not being sectarian, at not being abstract but interested in humanity, at not having a narrow but a broad outlook. In so far as, from a certain side, our Movement has grown out of the Theosophical Movement, it retains the seeds of sectarianism. These seeds must be crushed. What is sectarian must be cast out. Above everything there is need for wide horizons and an unprejudiced contemplation of reality.

I said recently that those who cut off coupons must clearly realise that in the cut-off coupons there lies the labour power of men, and that in so far as human labour power is enslaved by the capitalist economic order, the cutter of coupons is taking part in this enslavement. The answer to this should not be “How shocking”, or anything of that kind, for “how shocking” is dreadfully theoretic and something that can easily land one in modern sectarian tendencies. I have often put this in another way—people hear of Lucifer and Ahriman and say to themselves: keep well out of the way; have nothing to do with Lucifer and Ahriman; I'll stand fast by God:—To deal with the matter in this abstract manner is to be only the more deeply drawn into the toils of Lucifer and Ahriman. We must have the sincerity and honesty to acknowledge that we are part of the present social process, from which we do not escape by deceiving ourselves. We should instead do our utmost to make it more healthy. At the present stage of mankind's development, the individual cannot help all this; but he can play his part in cooperating with his unfortunate fellowmen. Today it is not a matter of saying: be a good fellow, nor of sitting down to send out thoughts of universal love, and so on. The important thing is that being within this social process, we should come to an understanding with ourselves, and develop the capacity of even being bad with the bad—not that it is a good thing to be bad, but because a social order that is due to be overthrown forces the individual to live thus. We should not wish to live in the illusion that we are good and splendid, priding ourselves that we are better than others, but we should recognise that we are part of the social order and not be deceived about it. The less we give way to illusion, the greater will be the impulse to work for what will lead to the salvation of the social organism, to strive to acquire capacities, and to awake from the deep sleep of present-day humanity. Nothing can help here save the possible recourse to the energetic and penetrating thinking given by Spiritual Science, which may be contrasted with the feeble, lazy and half-hearted thinking of present-day official science.

This makes me think of how, eighteen or nineteen years ago, speaking at the Working Men's Club at Berlin, I said that science today is a bourgeois science and that it must evolve by freeing thinking, freeing knowledge, from the bourgeois element. The leaders of the proletariat today do not understand this, being convinced the bourgeois science they have adopted is something absolute—that what is true is true. Socialists do not consider how it all is connected with bourgeois development. They talk of the impulses, the emotions, of the proletariat, but their thinking is entirely bourgeois. Certainly many of you will say at this point: All the same, what is true is true! Indeed a certain amount of the truths, let us say, of chemistry, physics, mathematics, is of course true and these truths cannot be true either in a bourgeois sense or a proletarian sense. The theorem of Pythagoras is most certainly not true in a bourgeois sense or in a proletarian sense, but simply true. This however is not the point, the point is that the truths enclose a certain field; if one remains in this field what is contained within it can certainly be truths, but they are truths that are useful, convenient and suitable just for middle-class circles, whereas outside are many other truths which can also be known but remain unnoticed by the bourgeoisie. Thus, the point is not that the truths of chemistry and mathematics are true but that there exist besides other truths able to throw on the former the right light, and then a quite different shade of meaning is revealed. Then knowledge is given a wider scientific horizon than is possible for the bourgeoisie to give. It is not whether these matters are true or not but how much truth man wants. And the whole affair is coloured by the quality of the truth. Certainly the Professors of Chemistry at the Universities will not be able to make any remarkable sudden transitions, for in the laboratory it is he who has the knowledge about things and he knows that he is the last to do the thinking, that is done by the method. But as soon as this same thinking passes over into history, or into the history of literature, into all that men rescue from the economic life and bring into a sphere worthy of human beings, it immediately becomes free. History as we now have it is nothing but a middle-class fiction, as are philosophy and the other sciences. People, however, have no idea of this and accept it all as objective knowledge.

A healthy life can only take root when scientific research is given back its autonomy, in short, when the threefold order of which I have so often spoken is established.

I have here to add a small correction. Recently, in drawing your attention to the German Committee formed for our Appeal, I mentioned that Dr. Boos, Herr Molt and Herr Kühn had formed it. I have been notified that in Stuttgart our friend Dr. Unger is working with it in an essential way. This ought not to be forgotten.

Today I have been trying to throw light for you on things of contemporary history. I have it very much at heart that our friends should try to go more deeply into the social problem, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. You have the basis for an understanding of this social problem, and this understanding is what is of most importance. Whoever looks into present-day history will not imagine that we can hope for success in the Appeal and all connected with it, in the course of a few days. The lectures given in Zurich, extended and supplemented by certain definite questions, will shortly appear in book-form, so that the details of what is in the Appeal can be had in a few concise sentences. [ Note 01 ]

The next thing will be for the movements today devouring the social organism to be brought to the point of absurdity. These must first develop, however, into complete helplessness and calamity. But, at the right time, something must be ready which can be grasped when what is old has reached this point. Therefore it is so infinitely important that when once these impulses are taken to your hearts they should not be allowed to cool, but that each of you should help, as far as he is able, to bring about what must of necessity happen.

Our studies in Spiritual Science contain much that we cannot, perhaps, put to direct application in everyday life, and we may sometimes be inclined to feel it all rather remote from everyday life. But this is only seemingly the case. What we receive into the sphere of our knowledge concerning the secrets of the spiritual world is at every hour, at every moment, of vital and profound significance for our souls; what seems to be remote from us personally is often what the soul inwardly needs, In order to know the physical world we must make ourselves acquainted with it. But to know the spiritual world it is essential that we ourselves think through and make mental pictures of the thoughts and conceptions imparted to us by that world. These thoughts then often work quite unconsciously within the soul. That upon which the soul is working may seem to be quite remote, while in reality it is very near indeed to the higher domains of the life of soul.

And so we will study again to-day the life that takes its course between death and a new birth—that life that seems so far removed from the human being in the physical world. I will begin with a simple narration of what is found by spiritual investigation. These things can be understood if they are thought over and pondered time and again; through their own power they make themselves comprehensible to the soul. Anyone who does not understand them should realise that he has not thought them through often enough. Such matters must be investigated by means of Spiritual Science, but they can be understood if the soul will ponder them time and again. They will then be confirmed by the facts which meet us in life; if only life is properly studied, they will be substantiated by the facts of life.

You will realise from many of the Lecture Courses that have been given that consideration of the life between death and a new birth is fraught with difficulty, because its conditions are so entirely different from those of the life that can be pictured with the help of the organs of the physical body here within the physical world. We have to become acquainted with completely different conceptions.

When we enter into relationship with the things in our physical environment we know that only a small proportion of the beings around us in the physical world react to our actions, our manifestations of will, in such a way that pleasure or pain is caused by these actions of ours to beings in our environment. Reaction of-this kind takes place in the case of the animal kingdom and the human kingdom; but we are justified in our conviction that the mineral world (including what is in air and water) and also, in essentials, the world of plants are insensitive to what we call pleasure or pain when actions are performed by us. (Spiritually considered, of course, the matter is a little different, but that need not concern us at this point.) In the environment of the dead all this is changed. In the environment of the so-called dead conditions are such that everything—including what is done by the dead themselves—arouses either pleasure or pain in the whole environment.—The dead can do no single thing, he cannot, if I may speak pictorially, move a single one of his limbs without pleasure or pain being caused by what he does. We must try to think our way into these conditions of existence.—We must assimilate the thought that life between death and a new birth is so constituted that everything we do awakens an echo in the environment. During the whole period between death and a new birth we can do nothing, we cannot even move, pictorially speaking, without awakening pleasure or pain in our environment. The mineral kingdom as we have it around us on the physical plane does not exist for the dead, neither does our plant world. As you can gather from the book Theosophy these kingdoms are present in quite a different form. They are not present in the spiritual world in the form in which we know them here, namely, as realms devoid of feeling. The first kingdom of those we know on the physical plane, which has significance for the dead because it can be compared with what the dead has in his environment, is the animal kingdom. I do not of course mean the individual animals that are here on the physical plane, but the whole environment is such that its effect and influence are as if animals were there. The reaction of the environment is such that pleasure or pain proceeds from what is done. On the physical plane we stand upon mineral soil; the dead stands upon a ‘soil’, lives in an environment which may be compared with the animal nature in this sense. The dead, therefore, starts his life two kingdoms higher. On the Earth we get to know the animal kingdom only from the outside. The most external activity of the life between death and a new birth consists in acquiring a more and more intimate and exact knowledge of the animal world. For in this life between death and a new birth we must prepare all those forces which, working in from the Cosmos, organise our own body. In the physical world we know nothing of these forces. Between death and a new birth we know that our body, down to its smallest particles, is formed out of the Cosmos. For we ourselves prepare this physical body, bringing together in it the whole scope of animal nature; we ourselves build it up.

In order to make the picture more exact, we must acquaint ourselves with a concept, an idea, that is rather remote from present-day mentality. Modern man knows quite well that when a magnetic needle lies with one end pointing towards the North and the other towards the South, this is not caused by the needle itself, but that the Earth as a whole is a cosmic magnet of which one end points towards the North and the other towards the South. It would be considered pure nonsense to assert that the direction is brought about merely by forces contained in the magnetic needle. In the case of a seed or germ which develops in an animal or in a human being, all science and all schools of thought deny the factor of cosmic influence. What would be described as nonsense in the case of the magnetic needle is accepted without further thought in the case of an egg forming within the hen. But when the egg is forming within the hen the whole Cosmos is, in fact, participating; what happens on Earth is merely the stimulus to the play of cosmic forces. Everything that takes shape in the egg is an imprint of cosmic forces and the hen herself is only a place, an abode, in which the Cosmos, the whole World-System, is developing this work. And it is the same in the case of the human being. This is a thought with which we must become familiar.

Between death and a new birth, in company with Beings of the higher Hierarchies, the human being is working at this whole system of forces which permeates the Cosmos. For between death and a new birth he is not without employment; he works perpetually. He works in the Spiritual. The animal kingdom is the first realm with which he makes acquaintance—and in the following way. If he makes some mistake, he immediately becomes aware of pain, of suffering, in the environment; if he does something right, he becomes aware of pleasure, of joy, in the environment. He works on and on, calling forth pleasure or pain, until, finally, the soul-nature is such that it can descend and come together with what will live on Earth as a physical body, The being of soul could never descend if it had not itself worked at the physical form.

It is the animal kingdom, then, with which acquaintance is first made. The next is the human kingdom. Mineral Nature and the plant kingdom are absent. The dead's acquaintance with the human kingdom is limited—if we may use a familiar phrase. Between death and a new birth—and this begins immediately or soon after death—the dead has contact and can make links only with those human souls, whether still-living on Earth or in yonder world, with whom he has already had karmic connection on Earth, in the last or in an earlier incarnation. Other souls pass him by; they do not come within his ken. He becomes aware of the animal realm as a totality; only those human souls come within his ken with whom he has had karmic connection here on Earth; with these he grows more and more closely acquainted. You must not imagine that their number is small, for individual human beings have already passed through many Earth lives. In every Earth life a whole host of karmic connections has been made and of these is spun the web which then, in the spiritual world, extends over all the souls whom the dead has known in life; only those with whom acquaintance has never been made remain outside the circle.

This indicates a truth which should be emphasised, namely, the supreme importance of the Earth life for the individual human being. If there had been no Earth life we should be unable to form links with human souls in the spiritual world. The links are made karmically on Earth and then continue between death and a new birth. Those who are able to see into that world perceive how the dead gradually makes more and more links—all of which are the outcome of karmic connections formed on Earth,

Just as concerning the first kingdom with which the dead comes into contact—the animal kingdom—we can say that everything the dead does, even when he simply moves, causes either pleasure or pain in his environment, so we can say concerning everything experienced in the human realm in yonder world that the dead is in much more intimate connection with human beings in the domain of soul-life. When the dead becomes acquainted with a soul, he gets to know this soul as if he himself were within it, After death knowledge of another soul is as intimate as knowledge here on Earth of our own finger, head or ear—we feel ourselves within the other soul. The connection is much more intimate than it can ever be on Earth. There are two basic experiences in the community among human souls between death and a new birth: we are either within the other souls, or outside them. Even in the case of souls with whom we are already acquainted, we are now within, and then again outside them. Meeting with them consists in feeling at one with them, being within them. To be outside them means that we do not notice them. If we look at some object here on Earth, we perceive it; if we look away from it, we no longer perceive it. In yonder world we are actually within human souls when we are able to turn our attention to them; and we are outside them when we are not in a position to do so.

In what I have now told you, you have as it were the fundamental form of the soul's communion with other souls during the period between death and a new birth. Similarly, the human being is also within or outside the Beings of the other Hierarchies, the Angels, Archangels and so on. The higher the kingdom, the more intensely does a man feel bound to them after death; he feels as though they were bearing him, sustaining him with great power. The Archangels bear him more mightily than the Angels, the Archai again more mightily than the Archangels, and so on.

People to-day still find difficulty in acquiring knowledge of the spiritual world. The difficulties would more or less solve themselves if men would take a little more trouble to grow acquainted with the secrets of the spiritual world. There are here two methods of approach. One way of becoming acquainted with the spiritual world leads to complete certainty of the Eternal in one's own being. This knowledge, that in human nature there is an eternal core of being which passes through births and deaths—this knowledge, remote as it is to modern humanity, is relatively easy to attain; and it will be attained by those who have enough perseverance, along the path described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in other writings. It is attained by treading the path there described. That is one form of knowledge of the spiritual world. The other is what may be called concrete, direct intercourse with beings of the spiritual world, and we will now speak of the intercourse that is possible between those who are still on Earth and the so-called dead.

Such intercourse is most certainly possible but it presents greater difficulties than the first form of knowledge, which is easy to attain. Actual intercourse with an individual who has died is possible but difficult, because it demands scrupulous care on the part of the one who seeks it. Control and discipline are necessary for this kind of intercourse with the spiritual world, for it is connected with a very significant law. The very same thing that we recognise in men on Earth as lower impulses is, from the other, the spiritual side, higher life; and it may therefore easily happen when the human being has not attained true control of himself, that he experiences the rising of lower impulses through direct intercourse with the dead. When we make contact with the spiritual world in the general sense, when we acquire knowledge about our own immortality as beings of soul and spirit, there can be no question of the ingress of anything impure. But when it is a matter of contact with individuals who have died, the relation of the individual dead—strange as it seems—is always a relation with the blood and nervous system. The dead enters into those impulses which live themselves out in the system of blood and nerves, and in this way lower impulses may be aroused. Naturally, there can only be danger for those who have not purified their natures through discipline and control. This must be said, for it is the reason why it is forbidden in the Old Testament to have intercourse with the dead. Such intercourse is not sinful when it happens in the right way. The methods of modern spiritualism must, of course, be avoided. When the intercourse is of a spiritual nature it is not sinful, but when it is not accompanied by pure thoughts it can easily lead to the stimulation of lower passions. It is not the dead who arouse these passions but the element in which the dead live. For consider: what we here feel as ‘animal’ in quality and nature is the basic element in which the dead live. The kingdom in which the dead live can easily be changed when it enters into us; what is higher life in yonder world can become lower when it is within us on Earth. It is very important to remember this, and it must be emphasised when we are speaking of intercourse between the living and the so-called dead, for it is an occult fact. We shall find that precisely when we are speaking about this intercourse the spiritual world can be described as it really is; for such experiences reveal the complete difference of the spiritual world from the physical world.

First of all, I will tell you something that may seem to have no meaning for man so long as he has not developed his clairvoyant faculties; but when we think it over, we shall realise that it concerns us closely, leading on as it does to matters in actual life. Those who are able to have intercourse with the dead as the result of developed clairvoyance, realise why it is so difficult for human beings to know anything about the dead through direct perception. Strange and grotesque as it may seem, the whole form of intercourse to which we are accustomed in the physical world has to be reversed when intercourse is set up between the Earth and the dead. In the physical world, when we speak with a human being from physical body to physical body, we ourselves are speaking, When we speak, we know that the words come from us; when the other man speaks to us, we know that the words come from him. The whole relationship is reversed when we are speaking with a dead man. The expression ‘when we are speaking’ can truthfully be used, but the relationship is reversed. When we put a question to the dead, or say something to him, what we say comes from him, comes to us from him. He inspires into our soul what we ask him, what we say to him. And when he answers us or says something to us, this comes out of our own soul. It is a process with which a human being in the physical world is quite unfamiliar. He feels that what he says comes out of his own being. In order to establish intercourse with the dead, we must adapt ourselves to hear from them what we ourselves say, and to receive from our own soul what they answer.

Thus abstractly described, the nature of the process is easy to grasp; but really to become accustomed to the total reversal of the familiar form of intercourse is exceedingly difficult. The dead are always there, always among us and around us, and the fact that they are not perceived is largely due to lack of understanding of this reversed form of intercourse. On the physical plane we think that when anything comes out of our own soul, it comes from us. And we are far from being able to pay intimate enough attention to whether it is not, after all, being inspired into us from the spiritual environment. We prefer to connect it with experiences familiar on the physical plane, where, if something comes to us from the environment, we ascribe it at once to the other person. This is the greatest error when it is a matter of intercourse with the dead.

I have here been telling you of one of the fundamental characteristics of intercourse between the so-called living and the so-called dead. If this example helps you to realise one thing only, namely, that conditions are completely reversed in the spiritual world, that there one has as it were to turn right round, then you will have taken hold of a significant concept that is constantly needed by those who wish to enter the spiritual world. The concept is extremely difficult to apply in the actual, individual case. For instance, in order to understand even the physical world, which is permeated through and through with the spiritual, it is essential to grasp this idea of complete reversal. And because modern science fails to grasp it and it is altogether unknown to popular consciousness, therefore there is today no spiritual understanding of the physical world. One experiences this even with people who try very hard indeed to comprehend the world, and one is often obliged simply to accept the situation and leave it so. Some years ago I spoke to a large number of our friends at a General Meeting in Berlin about the physical organism of man, with special reference to certain of Goethe's ideas. I tried to explain how the head, in its physical form, can only be understood aright when it is conceived as a complete transformation of the other part of the organism. No one was able to understand at all that a bone in the arm would have to be turned inside out like a glove, in order that a head-bone might be produced from it. It is a difficult concept but one cannot really understand anatomy without such pictures. I mention this in parenthesis only. What I have said to-day about intercourse with the dead is easier to understand. The happenings I have described to you are going on all the time. All of you sitting here now are in constant intercourse with the dead, only ordinary consciousness knows nothing of it because it proceeds in the sub-consciousness. Clairvoyant consciousness does not charm anything new into being; it merely brings up into consciousness what is present all the time in the spiritual world. All of you are in constant intercourse with the dead.

And now we will consider how intercourse with the dead takes place in individual cases. When someone has died and we are left behind, we may ask: How do I approach the dead so that he experiences me in himself? How does the dead come near me again so that I can live in him? These questions may well be asked but they cannot be answered if we have recourse to concepts familiar to us on the physical plane. On the physical plane ordinary consciousness functions only from the time of waking until the time of falling asleep; but the other part of consciousness which remains dim in ordinary life between falling asleep and awaking is just as important. In the real sense, the human being is not unconscious when he is asleep; his consciousness is merely so dim that he experiences nothing of it. It is a dim consciousness. But the whole man—in waking and sleeping life—must be held in mind when we are studying the connections of the human being with the spiritual world. Think of your own biography. You consider the course of your life always with interruptions; you describe only what has happened in your waking life. Life is thus broken: waking-sleeping; waking-sleeping. But you are also there while you sleep; and in studying the whole human being, waking life and sleeping life must be taken into consideration. A third thing must also be considered in connection with man's intercourse with the spiritual world. For besides waking life and sleeping life there is a third state, even more important for intercourse with the spiritual world than waking and sleeping life as such. I mean the actual act of waking and the actual act of going to sleep, which last only a moment, for we immediately pass on into other conditions. If we develop delicate, sensitive feelings for these moments of waking and going to sleep, we shall find they shed great light on the spiritual world. In remote country places—such customs are gradually disappearing, but in the time when we who are older were still young—people were wont to say: When you wake up it is not good immediately to go to the window through which light is pouring; you should remain a little while in the dark. Country folk used to have some knowledge about intercourse with the spiritual world, and they preferred in this moment of waking not immediately to come into the bright daylight but to remain inwardly collected in order to preserve something of what sweeps with such power through the human soul at the moment of waking. The sudden brightness of daylight is disturbing. In the cities, of course, this is hardly to be avoided; there we are disturbed not only by the daylight but also even before waking by the noise of the streets, the clanging of tramcar bells and so forth. The whole of civilised life seems to conspire to hinder man's intercourse with the spiritual world. This is not said in order to decry material civilisation, but the fact must be borne in mind. Again at the moment of falling asleep the spiritual world approaches us with power; but we immediately fall asleep, losing consciousness of what has passed through the soul. Exceptions can, however, occur.

These moments of waking and of falling asleep are of the utmost significance for intercourse, for example, with the so-called dead—and with other spiritual Beings of the higher world. In order however to understand what I have to say on this matter you must familiarise yourselves with an idea which it is not easy to apply on the physical plane and which is therefore practically unknown. The idea is this. In the spiritual sense, what is ‘past’ has not really passed away but is still there. In physical life men have this conception in regard to Space only. If you stand in front of a tree, then go away and look back at it later on, the tree has not disappeared; it is still there. In the spiritual world it is so in regard to Time. If you experience something at one moment, it has passed away the next so far as physical consciousness is concerned; spiritually conceived, it has not passed away. You can look back at it just as you looked back at the tree. Richard Wagner showed that he had knowledge of this, in the remarkable words: “ Time here becomes Space ”. It is an occult fact that in the spiritual world there are distances which do not come to expression on the physical plane. That an event is past means simply that it is farther away from us. I want you to bear this in mind. For man on Earth in the physical body, the moment of falling asleep is ‘past’ when the moment of waking arrives. In the spiritual world, however, the moment of falling asleep has not gone; we are only, at the moment of waking, a little farther distant from it. We confront our dead at the moment of falling asleep, and again at the moment of waking. (As I have said, this happens continually, only it usually remains in the sub-consciousness.) So far as physical consciousness is concerned, these are two quite different moments; for spiritual consciousness the one is only a little farther distant than the other. I want you to remember this in connection with what I am now going to say; otherwise you may find it difficult to understand.

As I told you, the moments of waking and falling asleep are of particular importance for intercourse with the dead. In our whole life there are no single moments of falling asleep or of waking when we do not come into relation with the dead.

The moment of falling asleep is especially favourable for us to turn to the dead. Suppose we want to ask the dead something. We can carry it in our soul, holding it until the moment of falling asleep; for that is the time to bring our questions to the dead, Other opportunities exist, but this moment is the most favourable. When, for instance, we read to the dead we certainly draw near to them. But for direct intercourse it is best of all if we address our questions to the dead at the moment of falling asleep.

On the other hand, the moment of waking is the most favourable for what the dead have to communicate to us. And again there is no one—did people but know it—who does not bring with him at the moment of waking countless tidings from the dead. In the unconscious region of the soul we are speaking continually with the dead. At the moment of falling asleep we put our questions to them, we say to them what, in the depths of the soul, we have to say. At the moment of waking the dead speak with us, give us the answers. But we must grasp the connection that these are only two different points and that, in the higher sense, these things that happen after each other are really simultaneous, just as on the physical plane two places are simultaneous.

Now, for intercourse with the dead, some things in life are more favourable, others less so. And we may ask: What can really help our intercourse with the dead? The manner of our intercourse with the dead cannot be the same as the manner of our speech with the living; the dead neither hear nor take in this kind of speech. There is no question of being able to chatter with the dead as we chatter with one another at five o'clock teas and in cafes. What makes it possible to put questions to the dead or to communicate something to the dead, is that we unite the life of feeling with our thoughts and ideas. Suppose a man has passed through the Gate of Death and you want your subconsciousness to communicate something to him in the evening. For it need not be communicated consciously. You can prepare it at some time during the day; then if you go to bed at ten o'clock at night having prepared it, say, at noon, it passes over to the dead when you fall asleep. The question must, however, be put in a particular way; it must not merely be a thought or an idea, it must be imbued with feeling and with will. Your relationship with the dead must be one of the heart, of inner interest. You must remind yourself of your love for the dead when he was alive, and address yourself to him not abstractly, but with real warmth of heart. This can so take root in the soul that in the evening at the moment of going to sleep, without your knowing it, it becomes a question to the dead. Or you may try to realise vividly what was the nature of your particular interest in the dead. It is very good to do the following. Think about your life with the one who is now dead; visualise actual moments when you were together with him, and then ask yourself: What was it that particularly interested me about him, that attracted me? When was it that I was so deeply impressed,—liked what he said, and found it helpful and valuable? If you remind yourself of moments when you were strongly connected with the dead and were deeply interested in him, and then turn this into a desire to speak to him, to say something to him—if you develop the feeling in purity and let the question arise out of the interest you took in the dead, then the question or the communication remains in your soul, and when you go to sleep it passes over to him. Ordinary consciousness as a rule will know little of the happening, because sleep ensues immediately; but what has thus passed over often remains present in dreams. In the case of most dreams—although from the point of view of actual content they are misleading—in the case of most dreams we have of the dead, all that happens is that we interpret them incorrectly. We interpret them as messages from the dead, whereas they are nothing but the echoing of the questions or communications we have ourselves directed to the dead. We should not think that the dead is saying something to us in our dream, but we should see in the dream something that goes out from our own soul to the dead. The dream is the echo of this. If we were sufficiently developed to be conscious of our question or communication to the dead at the moment of going to sleep, it would seem to us as though the dead himself were speaking—hence the echo in the dream seems as if it were a message from him. In reality it comes from us. This becomes intelligible only when we understand the nature of clairvoyant connection with the dead. What the dead seems to say to us is really what we are saying to him.

The moment of waking is especially favourable for the dead to approach us. At the moment of waking, very much comes from the dead to every human being. A great deal of what we undertake in life is really inspired into us by the dead or by Beings of the higher Hierarchies, although we attribute it to ourselves, as coming from our own soul.

What the dead say comes out of our own soul. The life of day draws near, the moment of waking passes quickly by, and we are seldom disposed to observe the intimate indications that arise out of our soul. And when we do observe them we are vain enough to attribute them to ourselves; Yet in all this—and in much else that comes out of our own soul—there lives what our dead have to say to us. What the dead say to us seems to arise out of our own soul. If men knew what life actually is, this knowledge would give rise to a feeling of reverence and piety towards the spiritual world in which we and our dead continually live. We should realise that in much of what we do, it is the dead who are working. The knowledge that round about us, like the air we breathe, there is a spiritual world, the knowledge that the dead are round about us and that it is only we who are not able to perceive them—this knowledge must unfold in Spiritual Science, not as external theory but permeating the soul as veritable inner life. The dead speak to us in our inner being but we interpret our own inner being incorrectly.

If we were to understand it aright, we should know ourselves to be united in our inmost being with the souls who are the so-called dead.

Now there is a great difference according to whether a soul passes through the Gate of Death in relatively early years or later in life. When young children who have loved us die, it is a very different thing from the death of people older than ourselves. Experience of the spiritual world describes this difference in the following way. The secret of communion with children who have died can be expressed by saying that in the spiritual sense we do not lose them, they remain with us. When children die in early life they continue ever present with us—spiritually—to a very marked degree. I should like to give it to you as a theme for meditation to be thought through and developed, that when children die they are not lost to us; we do not lose them, they stay with us spiritually. Of older people who die, the reverse may be said. Those who are older do not lose us. We do not lose little children; older people do not lose us. Older people when they die are strongly drawn to the spiritual world, but this also gives them the power so to work into the physical world that it is easier for them to approach us. True, they withdraw from the physical world much farther than do children who remain with us, but older people are endowed with higher faculties of perception than are children who die young. Those who are older retain us. Knowledge of different souls in the spiritual world reveals that those who died in old age live, through being able to enter more easily into souls on Earth; they do not lose the souls on Earth. And we do not lose the children, for the children remain more or less within the sphere of earthly man. The meaning of this difference can also be considered in another connection.

We have not always sufficiently deep or delicate perceptions in regard to the experiences of the soul on the physical plane. When friends die, we mourn and feel pain. When good friends in the Society have passed away, I have often said that it is not the task of Anthroposophy to offer people shallow consolation for their pain or try to talk them out of their sorrow. Sorrow is justified; one should grow strong to bear it, not let oneself be talked out of it. In regard to the pain and the sorrow, people make no distinction as to whether it is caused by the death of a child or of an older person. Spiritually perceived, there is a great, great difference. When little children have died the pain of those who have remained behind is really a kind of compassion—no matter whether such children were their own or other children whom they loved. Children remain together with us and because we have been united with them they convey their pain to our souls; we feel their pain—that they would fain still be here! Their pain is eased when we bear it with them. The child feels in us. It is good when a child can share his feeling with us; his pain is thereby relieved.

On the other hand, the pain we feel at the death of older people—whether it be our own parents or our friends—this can be called egotistical pain. An older person who has died does not lose us and the feeling he has is therefore different from the feeling present in a child. One who died in later life retains us, does not lose us. We here in life feel that we have lost him—the pain is therefore only our concern. It is egotistical pain. We do not share his feeling as we do in the case of children, we feel the pain for ourselves.

It is really so that a clear distinction can be drawn between these two forms of pain: egotistical pain in regard to the old, a pain fraught with compassion in regard to little children. The child lives on in us and we actually feel what) the child feels. In reality, our own soul mourns only for those who died in the later years of their life.

Just such a matter as this can show us the great significance of knowledge of the spiritual world. For you see, Divine Service for the Dead can be adjusted in accordance with these truths. In the case of a child who has died, it will not be altogether appropriate to emphasise the specifically individual aspect. Because the child, as we saw, lives on in us and remains with us, it is good that the service of remembrance should take a more universal form, giving the child, who is still living with us, something that is wide and universal. Therefore, in the case of a child, ceremonial in the service for the Dead is preferable to a specific funeral oration. The Catholic ritual is better here in one respect, the Protestant in the other. The Catholic service includes no funeral oration but consists in ceremony, in rite. It is general, universal; and it is alike for all. And what can be alike for all is especially good for children. In the case of one who has died in later years, the individual aspect is more important. The best funeral service here will be one in which the life of the individual is remembered. The Protestant service, with the oration referring to the life of the one who has died, will have great significance for the soul; the Catholic ritual will mean less in such a case. The same distinction holds good for all our thought about the dead. For the child it is best when we enter into a mood where we feel bound up with him; we try to turn our thoughts to him, and these thoughts will then draw near to him when we go to sleep. Such thoughts may be of a more general kind—such for example as may be directed to all those who have passed through the Gate of Death. In the case of an older person, we must direct our thoughts of remembrance to him as an individual, thinking about his life on Earth and what we experienced together with him. In order to enter into the right intercourse with an older person it is very important to visualise his being, to make his being come to life in ourselves—not only by remembering things he said which meant a great deal to us but by thinking of what he was as an individual and what his value was for the world. If we make these things inwardly living, they will enable us to come into connection with an older person who-has died and to have the right thoughts of remembrance for him. So you see, for the unfolding of true piety it is important to know what attitude should be taken to those who have died early and to those who have died in the later years of life.

Just think what it means at the present time when so many human beings are dying in their youth, to be able to say to oneself: They are really always present, they are not lost to the world. I have spoken of this from other points of view, for such matters must always be considered from different angles. If we succeed in becoming conscious of the spiritual world, one realisation at least will light up for us out of the infinite sorrow with which the present days are fraught—that because those who die young remain present with us, a living spiritual life can arise through community with the dead. A living spiritual life can and will arise, if only materialism does not unfold its strength to such a degree that Ahriman is able to stretch out his claws and gain the victory over all human powers.

Many a man may say, speaking purely on the physical plane, that indications such as I have been giving seem to him quite remote, he would prefer to be told something definite he can do morning and evening to bring him into a right relation with the spiritual world. But this is not quite correct thinking. Where the spiritual world is concerned the first essential is that we should develop thoughts about it. And even if it seems as though the dead were remote, while present life is near and close at hand, the very fact that we have such thoughts as have been described to-day, that we let our mind dwell on things seemingly remote from external life—this very fact uplifts and develops the soul, imparts to it spiritual force and spiritual nourishment. What brings us into the spiritual world is not what is seemingly near at hand, but first and foremost, what comes from the spiritual world itself. Do not, therefore, be afraid of thinking these thoughts through again and again, continually bringing them to life anew within the soul. There is nothing more important for life, even for material life, than the strong and sure realisation of communion with the spiritual world. If modern men had not so entirely lost their connection with the spiritual, these grave times would not have come upon us. Only a very few men to-day have insight into this connection; but insight will most surely come in the future. To-day men think: When a human being has passed through the Gate of Death, his activity ceases so far as the physical world is concerned. But it is not so, in reality. There is a living and perpetual intercourse between the so-called dead and the so-called living. Those who have passed through the Gate of Death have not ceased to be present, it is just that our eyes have ceased to see them. They are there, nevertheless. Our thoughts, our feelings, our impulses of will are connected with the dead. The Gospel words hold good for the dead as well: “ The Kingdom of the Spirit cometh not with observation (that is to say, external observation); neither shall they say, Lo here, lo there, for behold, the Kingdom of the Spirit is within you.” For we should not seek for the dead through externalities but should become conscious that they are always present. All historical life, all social life, all ethical life, proceed by virtue of co-operation of the so-called living with the so-called dead. The whole being of man can be infinitely strengthened when his consciousness is filled not only with the realisation of his firm stand here in the physical world but with the inner realisation that comes to him when he can say of the dead whom he has loved: The dead are with us, they are in our midst. This too is part of a true knowledge and understanding of the spiritual world, which has, as it were, to be pieced together from many different fragments. We can only say that we know the spiritual world when the way in which we think and speak about it comes from the spiritual world itself.

The dead are in our midst—this sentence is in itself an affirmation of the spiritual world; and only the spiritual world can awaken within us the consciousness that the dead are, in very truth, with us.

In our study of Spiritual Science there is a great deal that we cannot, perhaps, directly apply in everyday life, and we may at times feel that it is all rather remote. But the remoteness is only apparent. What we receive into the sphere of our knowledge concerning the secrets of the spiritual world is at every hour, at every moment, of vital and profound significance for our souls; what seems to be remote from us personally is often what the soul inwardly needs. In order to know the physical world we must make ourselves acquainted with it. But to know the spiritual world it is essential that we ourselves shall think through and master the thoughts and conceptions imparted by that world. These thoughts then often work quite unconsciously within the soul. Many things may seem to be remote, whereas in reality they are very near indeed to the higher realms of the soul's life.

And so again today we will think of the life that takes its course between death and a new birth—the life that seems so far removed from the human being in the physical world. I will begin by simply narrating what is found by spiritual investigation. These things can be understood if sufficient thought is applied to them; through their own power they make themselves comprehensible to the soul. Anyone who does not understand them should realize that he has not thought about them deeply enough. They must be investigated by means of Spiritual Science, but they can be understood through constant study. They will then be confirmed by the facts with which life itself confronts us, provided life is rightly observed.

You will have realized from many of the lecture-courses that study of the life between death and rebirth is fraught with difficulty, because its conditions are so entirely different from those of the life that can be pictured by the organs of the physical body here in the physical world. We have to become acquainted with utterly different conceptions.

When we enter into relationship with the things in our physical environment we know that only a small proportion of the beings around us in the physical world react to our deeds, to the manifestations of our will, in such a way that pleasure or pain is caused by these deeds of ours. Reaction of this kind takes place in the case of the animal kingdom and the human kingdom; but we are justified in the conviction that the mineral world (including what is contained in air and water), and also, in essentials, the world of plants, are insensitive to what we call pleasure or pain as the result of deeds performed by us. (Spiritually considered, of course, the matter is a little different, but that need not concern us at this point.) In the environment of the Dead all this is changed. Conditions in the environment of the so-called Dead are such that everything—including what is done by the Dead themselves—causes either pleasure or pain. The Dead can do no single thing, they cannot—if I may speak pictorially—move a single limb without pleasure or pain being caused by what is done. We must try to think our way into these conditions of existence. We must assimilate the thought that life between death and a new birth is so constituted that everything we do awakens an echo in the environment. Through the whole period between death and a new birth we can do nothing, we cannot even move, metaphorically speaking, without causing pleasure or pain in our environment. The mineral kingdom as we have it around us on the physical plane does not exist for the Dead, neither does the world of plants. As you can gather from the book Theosophy, these kingdoms are present in an entirely different form. They are not present in the spiritual world in the form in which we know them here, namely, as realms devoid of feeling.

The first kingdom of those familiar to us on the physical plane which has significance for the Dead because it is comparable with what the Dead has in his environment, is the animal kingdom. I do not, of course, mean individual animals as we know them on the physical plane, but the whole environment is such that its effects and influences are as if animals were there. The reaction of the environment is such that pleasure or pain proceeds from what is done. On the physical plane we stand upon mineral soil; the Dead stands upon a ‘soil,’ lives in an environment which may be compared with the animal nature in this sense. The Dead, therefore, starts his life two kingdoms higher. On the earth we know the animal kingdom only from outside. The most external activity of the life between death and a new birth consists in acquiring a more and more intimate and exact knowledge of the animal world. For in this life between death and a new birth we must prepare all those forces which, working in from the Cosmos, organize our own body. In the physical world we know nothing of these forces. Between death and a new birth we know that our body, down to its smallest particles, is formed out of the Cosmos. For we ourselves prepare this physical body, bringing together in it the whole of animal nature; we ourselves build it.

To make the picture more exact, we must acquaint ourselves with an idea that is rather remote from present-day mentality. Modern man knows quite well that when a magnetic needle lies with one end pointing towards the North and the other towards the South, this is not caused by the needle itself, but that the earth as a whole is a cosmic magnet of which one end points towards the North and the other towards the South. It would be considered sheer nonsense to say that the direction is determined by forces contained in the magnetic needle itself. In the case of a seed or germinating entity which develops in an animal or in a human being, all the sciences and schools of thought deny the factor of cosmic influence. What would be described as nonsense in the case of the magnetic needle is accepted without further thought in the case of an egg forming inside the hen. But when the egg is forming inside the hen, the whole Cosmos is, in fact, participating; what happens on earth merely provides the stimulus for the operation of cosmic forces. Everything that takes shape in the egg is an imprint of cosmic forces and the hen herself is only a place, an abode, in which the Cosmos, the whole World-System, is working in this way. And it is the same in the case of the human being. This is a thought with which we must become familiar.

Between death and a new birth, in communion with Beings of the higher Hierarchies, a man is working at this whole system of forces permeating the Cosmos. For between death and a new birth he is not inactive; he is perpetually at work—in the Spiritual. The animal kingdom is the first realm with which he makes acquaintance, and in the following way:—If he commits some error he immediately becomes aware of pain, of suffering, in the environment; if he does something right, he becomes aware of pleasure, of joy, in the environment. He works on and on, calling forth pleasure or pain, until finally the soul-nature is such that it can descend and unite with what will live on earth as a physical body. The being of soul could never descend if it had not itself worked at the physical form.

It is the animal kingdom, then, with which acquaintance is made in the first place. The next is the human kingdom. Mineral nature and the plant kingdom are absent. The Dead's acquaintance with the human kingdom is limited—to use a familiar phrase. Between death and a new birth—and this begins immediately or soon after death—the Dead has contact and can make links only with those human souls, whether still living on earth or in yonder world, with whom he has already been karmically connected on earth in the last or in an earlier incarnation. Other souls pass him by; they do not come within his ken. He becomes aware of the animal realm as a totality; only those human souls come within his ken with whom he has had some karmic connection here on earth and with these he becomes more and more closely acquainted. You must not imagine that their number is small, for individual human beings have already passed through many lives on the earth. In every life numbers of karmic connections have been formed and of these is spun the web which then, in the spiritual world, extends over all the souls whom the Dead has known in life; only those with whom no acquaintance has been made remain outside the circle.

This indicates a truth which must be emphasized, namely, the supreme importance of earthly life for the individual human being. If there had been no earthly life we should be unable to form links with human souls in the spiritual world. The links are formed karmically on the earth and then continue between death and a new birth. Those who are able to see into the spiritual world perceive how the Dead gradually makes more and more links—all of which are the outcome of karmic connections formed on earth.

Just as concerning the first kingdom with which the Dead comes into contact—the animal kingdom—we can say that everything the Dead does, even when he simply moves, causes either pleasure or pain in his environment, so we can say about everything experienced in the human realm in yonder world that it is much more intimately connected with the life of soul. When the Dead becomes acquainted with a soul, he gets to know this soul as if he himself were within it. After death, knowledge of another soul is intimate as knowledge here on earth of our own finger, head or ear—we feel ourselves within the other soul. The connection is much more intimate than it can ever be on earth.

There are two basic experiences in the community among human souls between death and a new birth; we are either within the other souls, or outside them. Even in the case of souls with whom we are already acquainted, we are sometimes within and sometimes outside them. Meeting with them consists in feeling at one with them, being within them; to be outside them means that we do not notice them, do not become aware of them. If we look at some object here on earth, we perceive it; if we look away from it, we no longer perceive it. In yonder world we are actually within human souls when we are able to turn our attention to them; and we are outside them when we are not in a position to do so.

What I have now said is an indication of the fundamental form of the soul's communion with other souls during the period between death and a new birth. Similarly, the human being is also within or outside the Beings of the Hierarchies, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and so on. The higher the kingdoms, the more intensely does man feel bound to them after death; he feels as though they were bearing him, sustaining him with great power. The Archangeloi are a mightier support than the Angeloi, the Archai again mightier than the Archangeloi, and so on.

People today still find difficulties in acquiring knowledge of the spiritual world. The difficulties would soon solve themselves if a little more trouble were taken to become acquainted with its secrets. There are two ways of approach. One way leads to complete certainty of the Eternal in one's own being. This knowledge, that in human nature there is an eternal core of being which passes through birth and death—this knowledge, remote as it is to the modern mind, is comparatively easy to attain; and it will certainly be attained by those who have enough perseverance, along the path described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and in other writings. It is attained by treading the path there described. That is one form of knowledge of the spiritual world. The other is what may be called direct intercourse with beings of the spiritual world, and we will now speak of the intercourse that is possible between those still living on earth and the so-called Dead.

Such intercourse is most certainly possible but it presents greater difficulties than the first form of knowledge, which is easy to attain. Actual intercourse with an individual who has died is possible, but difficult, because it demands scrupulous vigilance on the part of the one who seeks to establish it. Control and discipline are necessary for this kind of intercourse with the spiritual world, because it is connected with a very significant law. Impulses recognized as lower impulses in men on earth are, from the spiritual side, higher life; and it may therefore easily happen that when the human being has not achieved true control of himself, he experiences the rising of lower impulses as the result of direct intercourse with the Dead. When we make contact with the spiritual world in the general sense, when we acquire knowledge about our own immortality as beings of soul and spirit, there can be no question of the ingress of anything impure. But when it is a matter of contact with individuals who have died, the relation of the individual Dead—strange as it seems—is always a relation with the blood and nervous system. The Dead enters into those impulses which live themselves out in the system of blood and nerves, and in this way lower impulses may be aroused. Naturally, there is only danger for those who have not purified their natures through discipline and control. This must be said, for it is the reason why in the Old Testament it is forbidden to have intercourse with the Dead. Such intercourse is not sinful when it happens in the right way. The methods of modern spiritualism must, of course, be avoided. When the intercourse is of a spiritual nature it is not sinful, but when it is not accompanied by pure thoughts it can easily lead to the stimulation of lower passions. It is not the Dead who arouse these passions but the element in which the Dead live. For consider this: what we feel here as ‘animal’ in quality and nature is the basic element in which the Dead live. The kingdom in which the Dead live can easily be changed when it enters into us; what is higher life in yonder world can become lower impulses when it is within us on earth. It is very important to remember this, and it must be emphasized when we are speaking of intercourse between the Living and the so-called Dead, for it is an occult fact. We shall find that precisely when we are speaking about this intercourse, the spiritual world can be described as it really is, for such experiences reveal that the spiritual world is completely different from the physical world.

To begin with, I will tell you something that may seem to have no meaning for man as long as he has not developed faculties of clairvoyance; but when we think it over we shall realize that it concerns us closely. Those who are able to commune with the Dead as the result of developed clairvoyance, realize why it is so difficult for human beings to know anything about the Dead through direct perception. Strange as it may seem, the whole form of intercourse to which we are accustomed in the physical world has to be reversed when intercourse is established between the earth and the Dead. In the physical world, when we speak to a human being from physical body to physical body, we know that the words come from ourselves; when the other person speaks to us, we know that the words come from him. The whole relationship is reversed when we are speaking with one who has died. The expression ‘when we are speaking’ can truthfully be used, but the relationship is reversed. When we put a question to the Dead, or say something to him, what we say comes from him, comes to us from him. He inspires into our soul what we ask him, what we say to him. And when he answers us or says something to us, this comes out of our own soul. It is a process with which a human being in the physical world is quite unfamiliar. He feels that what he says comes out of his own being. In order to establish intercourse with those who have died, we must adapt ourselves to hear from them what we ourselves say, and to receive from our own soul what they answer.

Thus abstractly described, the nature of the process is easy to grasp; but to become accustomed to the total reversal of the familiar form of intercourse is exceedingly difficult. The Dead are always there, always among us and around us, and the fact that they are not perceived is largely due to lack of understanding of this reversed form of intercourse. On the physical plane we think that when anything comes out of our soul, it comes from us. And we are far from being able to pay intimate enough attention to whether it is not, after all, being inspired into us from the spiritual environment. We prefer to connect it with experiences familiar on the physical plane, where, if something comes to us from the environment, we ascribe it at once to the other person. This is the greatest error when it is a matter of intercourse with the Dead.

I have here been telling you of one of the fundamental principles of intercourse between the so-called Living and the so-called Dead. If this example helps you to realise one thing only, namely, that conditions are entirely reversed in the spiritual world, then you will have grasped a very significant concept and one that is constantly needed by those who aspire to become conscious of the spiritual world. The concept is extremely difficult to apply in an actual, individual case. For instance, in order to understand even the physical world, permeated as it is with the spiritual, it is essential to grasp this idea of complete reversal. And because modern science fails to grasp it and it is altogether unknown to the general consciousness, for this reason there is today no spiritual understanding of the physical world. One experiences this even with people who try very hard indeed to comprehend the world and one is often obliged simply to accept the situation and leave it as it is. Some years ago I was speaking to a large number of friends at a meeting in Berlin about the physical organism of man, with special reference to certain ideas of Goethe. I tried to explain how the head, in respect of its physical structure, can only be rightly understood when it is conceived as a complete transformation of the other part of the organism. No one was able to understand at all that a bone in the arm would have to be turned inside out like a glove, in order that a head-bone might be produced from it. It is a difficult concept, but one cannot really understand anatomy without such pictures. I mention this in parenthesis only. What I have said today about intercourse with the Dead is easier to understand.

The happenings I have described to you are going on all the time. All of you sitting here now are in constant intercourse with the Dead, only the ordinary consciousness knows nothing of it because it lies in the subconsciousness. Clairvoyant consciousness does not evoke anything new into being; it merely brings up into consciousness what is present all the time in the spiritual world. All of you are in constant intercourse with the Dead.

And now we will consider how this intercourse takes place in individual cases. When someone has died and we are left behind, we may ask: How do I approach the one who has died, so that he is aware of me? How does he come near me again so that I can live in him?—These questions may well be asked but they cannot be answered if we have recourse only to concepts familiar on the physical plane. On the physical plane, ordinary consciousness functions only from the time of waking until the time of falling asleep; but the other part of consciousness which remains dim in ordinary life between falling asleep and waking is just as important. The human being is not, properly speaking, unconscious when he is asleep; his consciousness is merely so dim that he experiences nothing. But the whole man—in waking and sleeping life—must be held in mind when we are studying the connections of the human being with the spiritual world. Think of your own biography. You reflect upon the course of your life always with interruptions; you describe only what has happened in your waking hours. Life is broken: waking-sleeping; waking-sleeping. But you are also present while you sleep: and in studying the whole human being, both waking life and sleeping life must be taken into consideration.

A third thing must also be held in mind in connection with man's intercourse with the spiritual world. For besides waking life and sleeping life there is a third state, even more important for intercourse with the spiritual world than waking and sleeping life as such. I mean the state connected with the act of waking and the act of going to sleep, which last only for brief seconds, for we immediately pass on into other conditions. If we develop a delicate sensitivity for these moments of waking and going to sleep we shall find that they shed great light on the spiritual world. In remote country places—although such customs are gradually disappearing—when we who are older were still young, people were wont to say: When you wake from sleep it is not good immediately to go to the window through which light is streaming; you should stay a little while in the dark. Country folk used to have some knowledge about intercourse with the spiritual world and at this moment of waking they preferred not to come at once into the bright daylight but to remain inwardly collected, in order to preserve something of what sweeps with such power through the human soul at the moment of waking. The sudden brightness of daylight is disturbing. In the cities, of course, this is hardly to be avoided; there we are disturbed not only by the daylight but also even before waking by the noise from the streets, the clanging of tramcar bells and so forth. The whole of civilized life seems to conspire to hinder man's intercourse with the spiritual world. This is not said in order to decry material civilization, but the facts must be remembered. Again at the moment of going to sleep the spiritual world approaches us with power, but we immediately fall asleep, losing consciousness of what has passed through the soul. Exceptions do, of course, occur.

These moments of waking and of going to sleep are of the utmost significance for intercourse with the so-called Dead—and with other spiritual Beings of the higher worlds. But in order to understand what I have to say about this you must familiarize yourselves with an idea which it is not easy to apply on the physical plane and which is therefore practically unknown. It is this:

In the spiritual sense, what is ‘past’ has not really vanished but is still there. In physical life men have this conception in regard to Space only. If you stand in front of a tree, then go away and look back at it later on, the tree has not disappeared; it is still there. In the spiritual world the same is true in regard to Time. If you experience something at one moment, it has passed away the next as far as physical consciousness is concerned; spiritually conceived, it has not passed away. You can look back at it just as you looked back at the tree. Richard Wagner showed that he had knowledge of this by the remarkable words: ‘Time here becomes Space.’ It is an occult fact that in the spiritual world there are distances which do not come to expression on the physical plane. That an event is past simply means that it is farther away from us. I beg you to remember this. For man on earth in the physical body, the moment of going to sleep is ‘past’ when the moment of waking arrives. In the spiritual world, however, the moment of falling asleep has not gone; we are only, at the moment of waking, a little farther distant from it. We encounter our Dead at the moment of going to sleep and again at the moment of waking. (As I said, this is perpetually happening, only it usually remains in the subconsciousness.) As far as physical consciousness is concerned, these are two quite different moments in time; for spiritual consciousness the one is only a little farther distant than the other. I want you to remember this in connection with what I am now going to say: otherwise you may find it difficult to understand.

As I told you, the moments of waking and going to sleep are particularly important for intercourse with those who have died. Through the whole of our life there are no such moments when we do not come into relation with the Dead.

The moment of going to sleep is especially favourable for us to turn to the Dead. Suppose we want to ask the Dead something. We can carry it in our soul, holding it until the moment of going to sleep, for that is the time to bring our questions to the Dead. Other opportunities exist, but this moment is the most favourable. When, for instance, we read to the Dead we certainly draw near to them, but for direct intercourse it is best of all if we put our questions to them at the moment of going to sleep.

On the other hand, the moment of waking is the most favourable for what the Dead have to communicate to us. And again there is no one—did people but know it—who at the moment of waking does not bring with him countless tidings from the Dead. In the unconscious region of the soul we are speaking continually with the Dead. At the moment of going to sleep we put our questions to them, we say to them what, in the depths of the soul, we have to say. At the moment of waking the Dead speak with us, give us the answers. But we must realize that these are only two different points and that in the higher sense, these things that happen after each other are really simultaneous, just as on the physical plane two places are there simultaneously.

Some factors in life are favourable for intercourse with the Dead, others are less so. And we may ask: What can really help us to establish intercourse with the Dead? The manner of our converse cannot be the same as it is with those who are alive, for the Dead neither hears nor takes in this kind of speech. There is no question of being able to chatter with one who has died as we chatter with one another at tea or in cafés. What makes it possible to put questions to the Dead or to communicate something to him is that we unite the life of feeling with our thoughts and ideas. Suppose a person has passed through the gate of death and you want your subconsciousness to communicate something to him in the evening. It need not to be communicated consciously; you can prepare it at some time during the day. Then, if you go to bed at ten o'clock at night having prepared it, say, at noon, it passes over to the Dead when you go to sleep. The question must, however, be put in a particular way; it must not merely be a thought or an idea, it must be imbued with feeling and with will. Your relationship with the Dead must be one of the heart, of inner interest. You must remind yourself of your love for the person when he was alive and address yourself to him with real warmth of heart, not abstractly. This feeling can take such firm root in the soul that in the evening, at the moment of going to sleep, it becomes a question to the Dead without your knowing it. Or you may try to realize vividly what was the nature of your particular interest in the one who has died. Think about your experiences with him; visualize actual moments when you were together with him, and then ask yourself: What was it about him that particularly interested me, that attracted me to him? When was it that I was so deeply impressed, liked what he said, found it helpful and valuable? If you remind yourself of moments when you were strongly connected with the Dead and were deeply interested in him, and then turn this into a desire to speak to him, to say something to him—if you develop the feeling with purity of heart and let the question arise out of the interest you took in him, then the question of the communication remains in your soul, and when you go to sleep it passes over to him. Ordinary consciousness as a rule will know little of the happening, because sleep ensues immediately. But what has thus passed over often remains present in dreams.

In the case of most dreams—although in respect of actual content they are misleading—in the case of most dreams we have of the Dead, all that happens is that we interpret them incorrectly. We interpret them as messages from the Dead, whereas they are nothing but the echoing of the questions or communications we have ourselves directed to the Dead. We should not think that the Dead is saying something to us in our dream, but we should see in the dream something that goes out from our own soul to the Dead. The dream is the echo of this. If we were sufficiently developed to be conscious of our question or communication to the Dead at the moment of going to sleep, it would seem to us as though the Dead himself were speaking—hence the echo in the dream seems as if it were a message from him. In reality it comes from ourselves. This becomes intelligible only when we understand the nature of clairvoyant connection with the Dead. What the Dead seems to say to us is really what we are saying to him.

The moment of waking is especially favourable for the Dead to approach us. At the moment of waking, very much comes from the Dead to every human being. A great deal of what we undertake in life is really inspired into us by the Dead or by Beings of the higher Hierarchies, although we attribute it to ourselves, imagining that it comes from our own soul. The life of day draws near, the moment of waking passes quickly by, and we seldom pay heed to the intimate indications that arise out of our soul. And when we do, we are vain enough to attribute them to ourselves. Yet in all this—and in much else that comes out of our soul—there lives what the Dead have to say to us. It is indeed so: what the Dead say to us seems as if it arises out of our own soul. If men knew what life truly is, this knowledge would engender a feeling of reverence and piety towards the spiritual world in which we are always living, together with the Dead with whom we are connected. We should realize that in much of what we do, the Dead are working. The knowledge that around us, like the very air we breathe, there is a spiritual world, the knowledge that the Dead are round about us only we are not able to perceive them—this knowledge must be unfolded in Spiritual Science not as theory but permeating the soul as inner life. The Dead speak to us inwardly but we interpret our own inner life incorrectly. If we were to understand it aright, we should know that in our inmost being we are united with the souls who are the so-called Dead.

Now it is not at all the same when a soul passes through the gate of death in relatively early years or later in life. The death of young children who have loved us, is a very different thing from the death of people older than ourselves. Experience of the spiritual world discovers that the secret of communion with children who have died can be expressed by saying that in the spiritual sense we do not lose them, they remain with us. When children die in early life they continue to be with us—spiritually with us. I should like to give it to you as a theme for meditation, that when little children die they are not lost to us; we do not lose them, they stay with us spiritually. Of older people who die, the opposite may be said. Those who are older do not lose us. We do not lose little children; elderly people do not lose us. When elderly people die they are strongly drawn to the spiritual world, but this also gives them the power so to work into the physical world that it is easier for them to approach us. True, they withdraw much farther from the physical world than do children who remain near us, but they are endowed with higher faculties of perception than children who die young. Knowledge of different souls in the spiritual world reveals that those who died in old age are able to enter easily into souls on earth; they do not lose the souls on earth. And we do not lose little children, for they remain more or less within the sphere of earthly man. The meaning of the difference can also be considered in another respect.

We have not always sufficiently deep insight into the experiences of the soul on the physical plane. When friends die, we mourn and feel pain. When good friends pass away, I have often said that it is not the task of Anthroposophy to offer people shallow consolation for their pain or try to talk them out of their sorrow One should grow strong enough to bear sorrow; not allow oneself to be talked out of it. But people make no distinction as to whether the sorrow is caused by the death of a child or of one who is elderly. Spiritually perceived, there is a very great difference. When little children have died, the pain of those who have remained behind is really a kind of compassion—no matter whether such children were their own or other children whom they loved. Children remain with us and because we have been united with them they convey their pain to our souls; we feel their pain—that they would fain still be here! Their pain is eased when we bear it with them. The child feels in us, shares his feeling with us, and it is good that it should be so; his pain is thereby ameliorated.

On the other hand, the pain we feel at the death of elderly people—whether relatives or friends—can be called egotistical pain. An elderly person who has died does not lose us and the feeling he has is therefore different from the feeling present in a child. One who dies in later life does not lose us. We here in life feel that we have lost him—the pain is therefore ours; it is egotistical pain. We do not share his feeling as we do in the case of children; we feel the pain for ourselves.

A clear distinction can therefore be made between these two forms of pain: egotistical pain in connection with the elderly; pain fraught with compassion in connection with little children. The child lives on in us and we actually feel what he feels. In reality, our own soul mourns only for those who died in the later years of their life.

It is a matter such as this that can show us the immense significance of knowledge of the spiritual world. For you see, Divine Service for the Dead can be adapted in accordance with these truths. In the case of a child who has died, it will not be altogether appropriate to emphasize the individual aspect. Because the child lives on in us and remains with us, the Service of Remembrance should take a more universal form, giving the child, who is still near us, something that is wide and universal. Therefore in the case of a child, ceremonial in the Service is preferable to a special funeral oration. The Catholic ritual is better here in one respect, the Protestant in the other. The Catholic Service includes no funeral oration but consists in ceremony, in ritual. It is general, universal, alike for all. And what can be alike for all is especially good for children. But in the case of one who has died in later years, the individual aspect is more important. The best funeral Service here will be one in which the life of the individual is remembered. The Protestant Service, with the oration referring to the life of the one who has died, will have great significance for the soul; the Catholic ritual will mean less in such a case.

The same distinction holds good for all our thought about those who have died. It is best for a child when we induce a mood of feeling connected with him; we try to turn our thoughts to him and these thoughts will draw near to him when we sleep. Such thoughts may be of a more general kind—such for example as may be directed to all those who have passed through the gate of death. In the case of an elderly person, we must direct our thoughts of remembrance to him as an individual, thinking about his life on earth and of experiences we shared with him. In order to establish the right intercourse with an older person it is very important to visualize him as he actually was, to make his being come to life in ourselves—not only by remembering things he said which meant a great deal to us but by thinking of what he was as an individual and what his value was for the world. If we make these things inwardly alive, they will enable us to come into connection with an older person who has died and to have the right thoughts of remembrance for him. So you see, for the unfolding of true piety it is important to know what attitude should be taken to those who have died in childhood and to those who have died in the later years of life.

Just think what it means at the present time when so many human beings are dying in comparatively early years, to be able to say to oneself: They are really always present, they are not lost to the world. (I have spoken of this from other points of view, for such matters must always be considered from different angles.) If we succeed in becoming conscious of the spiritual world, one realisation at least will light up in us out of the deep sorrow with which the present days are fraught. It is that because those who die young remain with us, a living spiritual life can arise through community with the Dead. A living spiritual life can and will arise, if only materialism is not allowed to become so strong that Ahriman is able to stretch out his claws and gain the victory over all human powers.

Many people may say, speaking purely of conditions on the physical plane, that indications such as I have been giving seem very remote; they would prefer to be told definitely what they can do in the morning and evening in order to bring themselves into a right relation with the spiritual world. But this is not quite correct thinking. Where the spiritual world is concerned, the first essential is that we should develop thoughts about it. And even if it seems as though the Dead are far away, while immediate life is close at hand, the very fact that we have such thoughts as have been described today and that we allow our minds to dwell on things seemingly remote from external life—this very fact uplifts the soul, imparts to it spiritual strength and spiritual nourishment. Do not, therefore, be afraid of thinking these thoughts through again and again, continually bringing them to new life with the soul. There is nothing more important for life, even for material life, than the strong and sure realization of communion with the spiritual world.

If modern men had not lost their relationship with spiritual things to such an extent, these grave times would not have come upon us. Only a very few today have insight into this connection, although it will certainly be recognized in the future. Today men think: When a human being has passed through the gate of death, his activity ceases as far as the physical world is concerned. But indeed it is not so! There is a living and perpetual intercourse between the so called Dead and the so-called Living. Those who have passed through the gate of death have not ceased to be present; it is only that our eyes have ceased to see them. They are there in very truth.

Our thoughts, our feelings, our impulses of will, are all concerned with the Dead. The words of the Gospel hold good for the Dead as well; ‘The Kingdom of the Spirit cometh not with observation’ (that is to say, external observation); ‘neither shall they say, Lo here, lo there, for behold, the Kingdom of the Spirit is within you.’ We should not seek for the Dead through externalities but become conscious that they are always present. All historical life, all social life, all ethical life, proceed by virtue of co-operation between the so-called Living and the so-called Dead. The whole being of man can be infinitely strengthened when he is conscious not only of his firm stand here in the physical world but is filled with the inner realization of being able to say of the Dead whom he has loved: They are with us, they are in our midst.

This too is part of a true knowledge and understanding of the spiritual world, which have as it were, to be woven together from many different threads. We cannot say that we know the spiritual world until the way in which we think and speak about it comes from that world itself.

The Dead are in our midst—these words in themselves are an affirmation of the spiritual world; and only the spiritual world itself can awaken within us the consciousness that in very truth the Dead are with us.